Mandatory vs. Optional

Another climbing quote, explored...

It’s a round trip.
Getting to the top is optional.
Getting home is mandatory.

- Ed Viesturs in No Shortcuts to the Top: 
Climbing the World’s 14 Highest Peaks (1996)

There are few people on Earth who can lay a greater claim to those words.

Ed Viesturs was the twelfth man to climb all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, and three of the eleven before him would later die on a mountain.

Today, Viesturs remains the only American who has climbed all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks without bottled oxygen. Climbing without bottled oxygen is, generally speaking, far more difficult than climbing without. So when Ed Viesturs talks about round trips, you listen.

And yet … in David Roberts’s fantastic memoir, On the Ridge Between Life and Death, Roberts recounts this exchange with Viesturs:

In order to continue to tiptoe among the appalling land mines of big-range mountaineering, hard men have always taken refuge in rationalizations…

In 1997, when I interviewed Ed Viesturs, I mentioned to him a rigorous German study that concluded that on any given expedition to an 8,000-meter peak, a climber stands a 1-in-34 chance of dying. By that point, Ed had been on seventeen such expeditions. He had come very close to dying on K2 in 1992, and in 1996 he had climbed past the bodies of his good friends Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, ace guides who had frozen to death just a week earlier, in the Everest debacle chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. A simple probability equation allowed me to calculate that, according to the German formula, Ed had so far accrued a 40 percent chance of dying.

He looked at me agog. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. Ed’s argument was that he was a far more skilled and careful climber than the average member of an expedition to an 8,000er, so the formula didn’t apply to him. I pointed out, “Yeah, but that statistic counts climbers who just go from base camp to Camp 1. You’re always going for the summit without oxygen.” Ed was unconvinced. I asked him what chance he thought he’d actually run of dying in the Himalaya.

“One in a hundred,” he said. “No, not even that much.”

“But Ed,” I protested, “you nearly died on K2.”

Roberts knew this well, because he’d previously co-authored a book with Viesturs: K2: Live and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain.

Viesturs summited K2 on October 16, 1992. But he and his partners had climbed up through frightening snow, and then had to climb back down through more. “I was convinced,” Viesturs later wrote, “that we were going to die. I kept telling myself that I’d probably just made the last and most stupid mistake of my life.”

Everyone did return safely to base camp, where Viesturs “made a solemn vow to myself – one that, I’m happy to say, I stuck to throughout the following thirteen years of going after 8,000ers. The vow: Your instincts are telling you something. Trust them and listen to them.”

K2 wasn’t even the most dangerous mountain Viesturs climbed. That would be Annapurna, with Nanga Parbat and Kangchenjunga also in the conversation. Of course, Viesturs did get up and down all of them. Without bottled oxygen.

Was Viesturs ultimately more realistic about objective hazards, and his own abilities and judgment, than many of his fellow mountaineers?

Quite probably. He survived. He did turn back sometimes, and he did not lose any fingers or toes.

Was he massively more realistic about those things?

Probably not.

In the spring of 2009, just short of his 50th birthday, Viesturs summited Mount Everest for the seventh time. By then his three children were four, eight, and eleven years old.

Although he’s never stopped climbing – still a working guide for Rainier Mountaineering Expeditions, Viesturs has summited Mt. Rainier more than 200 times – his last 8,000er was Everest in ‘09. Many top mountaineers have kept going, well into their 50s.

As the Australian mountaineer and author Greg Child once wrote, “Maybe Himalayan climbing is just a bad habit, like smoking, of which one says with cavalier abandon, ‘must give this up some day, before it kills me.’ ”