“Limits of the Known” by David Roberts
Published by W. W. Norton & Company (February 20, 2018)
Pages: 336
ISBN-10 : 0393609863
Date Finished: May 15 tk, 2022
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
Find it at Amazon or BookShop.org
My Notes:
That verdict was soon confirmed. The official name of my ailment was squamous oropharyngeal carcinoma.
For more than fifty years, I had thought of myself as an adventurer. During the first two decades, adventure meant mountain climbing.
For me, the passion was always allied to discovery and exploration. That was what made adventure so much more than a sport.
From 1981 on, I made my living as a freelance writer. In magazine articles and books, I sought to explicate not only my own compulsions but those of kindred souls, whether they were today's elite practiioners of their esoteric trades or figures from history whose motivations I could fathom only through their deeds and their writings.
Climbers and other explorers are notoriously inarticulate when it comes explaining why they spend their lives pursuing phantom goals. Yet in the end, why is the ultimate question.
And what have the passions of explorers across human history delivered to our understanding of life? What did it mean in 1911 to reach the South Pole, or the highest point on earth in 1953? What is the future of adventure, if any, in a world we have mapped and trodden all the way to the most remote corners of the wilderness?
Why do we do it? Why do we care? Why does it matter?
The purpose of this book is to grope toward an answer.
The toll of Arctic exploration during the Renaissance, not only in thwarted ambitions but in lost ships and lives, led to a hiatus of nearly two centuries in European probes toward the North Pole. Only at the end of the eighteenth century did mariners again take up the gauntlet.
Handsome, with a penetrating gaze and an almost regal air, he dressed habitually in the "Sanitary Woolen Clothing" of the German health nut Dr. Gustav Jaeger, who trumpeted the virtues of garb that would allow "evaporation of the 'noxious' emanations" given off by the body.
Just how daring Nansen's scheme was can be gleaned via an anachronistic analogy. To submit to an icy prison in a ship whose design had never been tested, and to trust to an invisible current whose existence had been only indirectly deduced, might have been akin to setting out on the first manned mission to the moon if the type of spaceship the astronauts rode, unlike Apollo 11, had gone through no trial runs whatsoever, with the route across 230,000 miles of empty space only guessed at.
In the opening pages of Farthest Northi, the book Nansen would write about the expedition—one of the truly magisterial accounts of terrestrial exploration of his or any other age—Nansen nonetheless laid out the rationale for the voyage.
Our object is to investigate the great unknown region that surrounds the Pole...
There, nestled in a small grove of trees, a sign informed us that the canyon was named after John H. Gregory, who in 1859 had pioneered the mountain route all the way to the future mining camp Black Hawk. This scrap of history electrified me. Dad had mentioned Black Hawk, but the legendary settlement seemed to me impossibly remote. What a man Gregory must have been to find his way there alone, fighting off bears and Indians! [Boulder]
I turned Green Mountain into a fetish, hiking (usually solo) up it some fifty times over three or four years by every known trail from all the points of the compass. For the antisocial misfit I became in early adolescence, Green Mountain was a spiritual sanctum, no a world of discovery.
Because my father was an astronomer, at an age when other kids were learning the Ten Commandments in Sunday school I was absorbing the expanding universe.
The store of butter alone weighed twice as much (86 pounds) as the sledge that carried it. Among the staples were foods that few explorers in our own day have ever tasted, including Vage's fish flour. ... That arctic stand, pemmican (a concentrated mixture of dried meat, animal fat, and berries), ...
In the twenty-first century, the North and South poles have been in some fundamental sense trivialized. The main agent behind this transofrmation is modern aircraft, whose capacity to reach previously inaccessible places on the surface of the earth could scarcely have been imagined in 1895.
It was not until 1930 that the fate of Andree's team was learned. The men had stayed airborne for only three days before their balloon crashed at 83° N. Making their way to remote White Island, the trio had prepared to live off the land. Diaries and photographs (developed, remarkably, after thirty-three years in the cold) suggested that they may have perished from trichinosis after eating undercooked meat from a polar bear they shot.
For the first few days in the mountains I would be jittery with the change, as half-formed fears and guilt about duties left undone jangled my nerves. Then contentment seeped in.
The longest I ever spent disconnected in the mountains was fifty-two days. That seemed plenty. Yet Nansen and his teammates submitted without an apparent qualm to the prospect of five years with no word to or from the "real" world left behind.
At the age of seventy-two, I had long since renounced any ambitions to set off into the Alaskan ranges and forge first ascents. But now the question of whether I should ever again hike a favorite canyon in Utah loomed uncertain.
On June 7 the men's provisions were reduced to a single day's supply of meat. Yet once again, they were able to shoot a walrus and replenish their store.
In the strict terms of completing the mission on which Nansen had set his heart—being the first to reach the North Pole—the expedition had failed. Yet the whole world saluted the triumph of the extraordinary voyage, and of the team's establishing a new landmark farthest north.
For more than half a century, the world accepted Robert E. Peary's claim to have been the first to reach the North Pole in 1909. Yet beginning in the 1970s, long-simmering doubts about the extraordinarily rapid times on Peary's final dash prompted a rigorous reexamination of his data. The consensus today is that Peary probably got within 100 miles of the pole, but faked the rest. Worn out by seven previous attempts to reach 90 N, his toes sacrifice to frostbite, he took refuge in a hoax rather than confess another failure to the world.
The first human beings to stand on the North Pole, then, were the crew of a Soviet military plane that landed there in 1937. The first "explorers" to reach the pole by travel across the ice were Ralph Plaisted's self-taught amateurs, who arrived by snowmobile on April 20, 1968. A few days later, they were downing beers back home in Minnesota.
Worn out by seven previous attempts to reach 90 degrees N, his toes sacrificed to frostbite, he took refuge in a hoax rather than confess another failure to the world. [Robert E. Peary]
The first human beings to stand at the North Pole, then, were the crew of a Soviet military plane that landed there in 1937.
Shipton always disdained big teams and regimented ranks. He once said, "If an expedition cannot be organized in a pub on the back of an envelope in a couple of hours it isn't worth going on." By 1953, his notions were considered quaint and out-of-date. Ironically, he is now seen—along with his best friend, H.W. (Bill) Tilman—as a retroactive hero of the avant-garde. The two men pioneered the light-and-fast alpine style that would eventually supersede the heavy logistical assaults that claimed the first ascents of all but one of the fourteen highest mountains in the world between 1950 and 1964.
In the 1930s, he complained, so many human activities were undertaken for all the wrong reasons: "for publicity, for sensationalism, for money, or because it is the fashion to do them."
There are no more blanks on the map of the world in 2017. And there are few adventures as stirring and all-encompassing as the lyrical summer he and his teammates spent wandering among the unknown peaks and glaciers of the Karakoram. It is we who were born too late.
He needed to get all the impedimenta that his reconnaissance required not to some base cam on a straightforward glacier, but across the main spine of the Karakoram, simply to begin the team's explorations. In Askole, the men hired one hundred porters—ethnic Baltis, whom in the language of the day Shipton refers to as "coolies." Even with so much manpower, the task was herculean. Once again, loads had to be stripped to the bare minimum.
We had food enough to keep us alive for three months in this place of my dreams, and the health and experience to meet the opportunity. I wanted nothing more.
.. a single though surged through brain: This is the most remote place I've ever been.
Blank on the Map is not the best of Shipton's six mountaineering narratives, but it remains a blithe evocation of an exploratory experienced the likes of which no one can have today. Yet Shipton was convinced that he lived in a decadent age, and he rued the fact that explorers before him had lived more boldly and more truly.
"Every time I start an expedition," he wrote, "I feel that I am getting back to a way of living which is now lost."
Reading those words today, I long to set Shipton straight. He lived in a golden age that we moderns would give much to recapture. There are no more blanks on the map of the world in 2017.
There seems to be an organic linkage between the style in which Shipton and Tilman traveled and the style in which they wrote. The expedition books of the 1930s, chronicling German attempts on Kangchenjunga and Nanga Parbat and the British on Everest (unless Shipton was the author), tended to portray the efforts in grimly serious, military language. The prose is full of siege and assault, advance and retreat, conquest and defeat. But Shipton and Tilman chose an ironic tone, glossing lightly over hardships and celebrating successes in the most modest language.
The Shipton-Tilman style of writing, like the fast-and-light ethos of expeditioneering the two men espoused, took decades to catch on. During the so-called Golden Age of Himilayan Mountaineering (1950-64), the chronicles that recorded the triumphs on the highest peaks in the world, such as Maurice Herzog's Annapurna, Sir John Hunt's The Ascent of Everest, and Ardito Desio's Victory over K2, treat the ascents as masterworks of logistical buildup capped by gutsy summit pushes by a stalwart pair of climbers. These books postulated that the success of only two men in reaching the highest point on the mountain spread its benediction to the whole team, and indeed served their country as a clarion declaration of national pride; instead, martial metaphors on every page supported a narrative that veered closer to melodrama than to understatement.
I was unable to walk more than a few yards from our small pile of gear for fear of crevasses and a single thought surged through my brain: This is the most remote place I've ever been.
The Butterfly Traverse, as we jauntily named our reconnaissance, would nearly cost us our lives.
Thanks to the maps, I was sure the Butterfly Traverse was feasible. The great joy so far had lain not in discovering terrain no one knew existed, but in being the first human beings to travel across a landscape the maps announced in exquisite detail.
Wading across rivers is an art at which climbers are far from proficient. Nor, to this day, is there any consensus as to how best to proceed at that dicey business. More than one expedition—like the French who made the first ascent of Fitz Roy in Patagonia in 1952—has had a member drown before the team even came to grips with its mountain objective.
"We very nearly came to grief. Angtensing was swept off his feet and I had great difficulty in holding him up until he had recovered enough to struggle ashore... After this, we humbly followed the lead of the Baltis, who knew far more about this hazardous business than any of us, and faced the torrents with surprising nonchalance." [Shipton]
"The view was magnificent," Shipton writes, but "too vast to comprehend... I tried to memorize the form of the country to the east, which we had come to see, but it was far too complicated, and I could not disentangle its intricacies." [Shipton]
Some tall shrubs which grew beside the shallow blue pools were now covered with pink blossoms. the song of small birds, the splash of a brook which welled from a crystal spring, the young hares running shyly across the meadows all welcomed us, and we lay on glades of soft green grass, half hidden in shady caverns of willow branches.
Shipton recorded his awe as his eye swept the 12,000 vertical feet from glacier to summit. "The sight was beyond my comprehension, and I sat gazing at it, with a kind of timid fascination, watching wreaths of mist creep in and out of corries utterly remote. I saw ice avalanches, weighing perhaps hundreds of tons, break off from a hanging glacier, nearly two miles above my head; the ice was ground to a fine powder and drifted away in the breeze long before it reached the foot of the precipice, nor did any sound reach my ears."
Only when they reach that outpost of British colonial sway did the men learn what had gone on in the world during their absense. The news was dark: the Spanish Civil War showed no signs of terminating, the Sino-Japanese War "was a new horror," and storm clouds gathering over Europe portended World War II. Writes Shipton, "The world seemed an even blacker and madder place than when we had left it."
... : for the supreme value of the expedition centered in an experience of real freedom rounded off with the peace and content of an arduous job of work completed and enjoyed."
[Shipton] Never before had I seen anything like the wild grandeur of those desert mountains, their stark simplicity and their boundless range.
... To have captured so much of it in a single season, and yet to feel we had won but a bare acquaintance, was at once tantalising and deeply satisfying.
In the last line of the penultimate chapter of That Untravelled World, Shipton wrote, "My visit to Alaska left me with a vivid impression of its vast mountaineering potential, and of a dynamic group of young climbers reveling in their splendid heritage and eager to share it with a stranger." Fifty years after our meeting, I cherish Shipton's galant gesture in acknoledging our youthful ascents. And for decades after 1966, whenever I set off on a wilderness journey of my own, I felt him looking over my shoulder, silently teaching me how exploration should be done.
The idea that wilderness is beautiful, and that exploits performed there—climbing mountains, running rivers, backpacking long distances—are rewarding, even inspirational, is so entrenched in our culture that casual students of history are shocked to learn that throughout most of the span of Western civilization quite the opposite view prevailed. The linkage of wilderness with the sublime has actually held sway only during the last 250 years, since the end of the eighteenth century. Far more characteristic in Western history is the complaint of an early traveler who braved the forest to reach the castle of Fontainebleau, the swanky royal hunting lodge southeast of Paris, built in 1137. "We had to go four leagues with nothing to eat or drink," the man averred, "and to console us we had nothing before our eyes but frightening and horrible mountains full of gross rocks, piled one on top of another." The gross rocks are the sandstone boulders on which France's best rock climbers now cavort.
The radical shift in Western attitudes toward nature launched by the Enlightenment and the Romantic revolution has been analyzed by many cultural historians, none more perceptive than Marjorie Hope Nicolson, whose Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959) fixes the long legacy of regarding raw nature as ugly and monstrous in the Judeo-Christian tradition of viewing the material world as sinful and corrupt.
Nicolson bases her exegesis on a principle that I had tried to impress upon my students: "What men see in Nature is a result of what they have been taught to see—lessons they have learned in school,
doctrines they have heard in church, books they have read." She traces the tradition of fear and abhorrence in the face of wilderness back to the Greeks and especially the Romans, but sees it solidified in the New Testament. Mountains, in particular, inspired distaste and horror. Mountain Glom and Mountain Glory serves, among other uses, as a rich anthology of passages in English literature that equate the peaks of the Alpsand even the hills of Britain to "Earth's Dugs, Risings, Tumors, Blisters, Warts." The connection between these "monstrous excrescences" and Original Sin became explicit in such poems as Henry Vaughan's "Corruption," in which Adam, exiled from Eden, "drew the Curse upon the world, / And the Crackt the whole frame with his fall."
All this dramatically changed after the middle of the eighteenth century. In western Europe, a new interest in climbing mountains was awakened by the competition to make the first ascent of Mont Blanc.
Attempts beginning in 1762 culminated in the triumph of Jacques Balmat and Michael Paccard on August 8, 1786. The birth of modern mountaineering is conventionally attributed to the race to reach the highest summit in the Alps.
Before the second half of the eighteenth century, ascents of mountains anywhere in Europe or North America were few and far between. Yet a single exception stands out, a cultural and historical anomaly that is still wreathed in mystery more than five hundred years later.
In 1489 Charles VIII, king of France, on a pilgrimage to the medieval cathedral of Notre-Dame d'Embrun, was forcefully struck by the silhouette of the peak (then known as Mont Inaccessible). His curiosity was further wetted by local rumors that angels had been seen floating around the summit. A year later, Charles incorporated the peak in his royal seal, with the motto Sepereminet Invius ("It stands, inaccessible"). And in 1492, he ordered his chamberlain, Antoine de Ville, to climb it.
A chamberlain's duties were to manage the household of the royal personage who hire him.
Only four concise, legalistic documents survive as primary sources for the extraordinary siege
of Mont Aiguille that de Ville's team undertook. Most vexing for the modern observer is that the climbers left only the sketchiest account of how they tackled the peak. A curt phrase in de Ville's proces-verbal (a kind of legal deposition) alludes to the "subtilz engins" the team deployed, and a single sentence in the quaint French of the day evokes the terror of the climb, which was "le plus horrible et expovantable passage que je viz james" ("the most horrible and appalling passage that I have ever seen"). It's clear that Jubie brought his special craft to the game, as an official letter penned by the almoner states that "One has to climb for half a league by means of ladders, and for a league by a path which is terrible to look at, and is still more terrible to descend than to ascend."
The climb took the team three days. At least the men reached the summit plateau. To their astonishment, after battling precipitous limestone, they discovered a lush meadow "which it would take forty men or more to mow."
At the time, about a thousand miles to the southwest, in the harbor of Palos de la Frontera in Spain, a little-known mariner named Cristobal Colon was loading his three ships with cargo in preparation for a voyage across the Atlantic into the unknown.
"He was unwilling to expose himself," the subsequent report explained, "by reason of the danger that there was of perishing there... [and] for fear lest he should seem to tempt the Lord, since at the mere sight of this mountain everyone was terrified." The witness did manage to spot de Ville and several others frolicking on the summit, as well as the three crosses, whose location had been chosen for visibility from the surrounding plains.
Climbing historians hail the 1492 ascent of Mont Aiguille as a pivital landmark. As Andrew Finkelstein writes, "Prehistoric man surely engaged in some low fifth class to reach a sacred summit or hunting vantage... [But] really it was 1492... that technical climbing began."
At first, I sought out ruins indicated by marks on maps or recommended by rangers, but I soon found that it was more rewarding to push down a canyon with no a priori idea of what was there.
If the Anasazi were virtuosi of any technique, it would have been scaling scary ladders and traversing wildly exposed ledges.
Among the Anasazi, the Tellem, the Chachopoya, the Toraja, the cave diggers of Mustang, and the Bedouin of the Wadi Rum, prehistoric climbing of a high technical level evidently served various purposes, ranging from storing precious grain to commemorating the dead to seeking refuge for meditation to hunting ibex. None of the motives of those cultures bore any resemblance to the Western passion for climbing to achieve personal and aesthetic goals. Yet the severity of the climbing testifies to a commitment to needs both utilitarian and spiritual every bit as intense as the passions that drove Whymper up the Matterhorn or Hillary to the top of Everest.
For about twenty years, from age seventeen to thirty-seven, climbing was the most important thing in my life. During that stretch, I went on expeditions to Alaska or the Yukon for thirteen straight years. For me, the ultimate prize in mountaineering was the first ascent of an unclimbed peak or a difficult new route on a mountain that had been climbed only a few times.
By the age of thirty-seven, however, I no longer felt that the mountains furnished an all-consuming purpose in life. It was, I suppose, partly a matter of simply getting older, of realizing that I had passed my climbing prime. I also felt that I was lucky still to be alive, and sometimes late at night, when sleep wouldn't come, I counted the close calls I had survived, rating them from fairly threatening to truly serious. I wish that I could have bowed out with some major accomplishment capping a worthwhile career, but it became instead a matter of choosing less and less ambitious goals. The list of mountaineers who quit cold after some stellar deed is indeed a short one—the great Italian alpinist Walter Bonatti being the exemplar.
By 1990, I had solidified a habit of spending at least several weeks each spring and fall in the Southwest, almost all of it in pursuit of little-known Anasazi wonders.
At no point did I consciously tell myself, This is what takes the place of climbing, but by the early 1990s I realized that those journeys had begun
to shape my year every bit as meaningfully as the old climbing cycle had once done.
The thrill of turning a canyon bend and discovering an unrecorded ruin or rock art panel came close to matching what I had once felt when putting up a new route.
The deed of a new route or a first ascent was of interest only to oneself, and perhaps to a small fraternity of fellow devotees. Climbing was not heroic, nor did it do anyone except its practitioners any good, nor did it really stretch the mind. But each time I found a new Anasazi site in the backcountry, the pride of discovery was subsumed in a larger concern: What was it all about? What were they doing here?
Were I inclined to be dogmatic, I might frame my realization thus: A quest in the wilderness to probe the mysteries of a lost or little-known culture is ultimately more rewarding that a quest to claim a trophy such as a new route or first ascent. But retrospective self-congratulation of this sort is the province of the aging adventurer. Instead, I will say only that such quests have given my life, after the age of forty, as much gratification and fulfillment as the boldest mountaineering ever did.
The technological progress of the century has reduced what were once the last unknown places on earth to arenas in which modern adventurers compete for increasingly arcane records (the fastest trek from A to B, the longest supported journey across C), always with one foot firmly anchored in the bailout zone of rescue by air.
It is tempting to see the state of exploration today as a played-out endeavor, a stage on which latter-day impostors try to emulate the heroes of yesteryear by manufacturing artificial challenges that grab headlines but add little or nothing to terrestrial discovery. (Worsley, no impostor, must have known how far his feats fell short of Shackleton's.) Indeed, the thrust of this book, in the preceding chapters, might seem to support such a pessimistic view. If we can no longer push into the unknown North, like Nansen, or reconnoiter a vast uncharted tract of the Karakoram, like Shipton, what is there left to discover?
Still, by 1949fewer than a hundred people had floated the length of the Grand Canyon.
I arrived in Bariloche full of misgivings, not only about my technical duties but about adventure racing itself. By turning the stunning peaks, rivers, and deserts of northern Patagonia into a racecourse, with forty-eight five-person teams careening their way on foot, by horse, and in rafts through a 250-mile gauntlet, supported and refereed by hundreds of company staff and reported by scores of journalists (mostly French), the Raid threatened, I thought, to desecrate the wilderness. Aside from the sheer human impact, racing against competitors seemed to me a perversion of the contemplative mind-set with which men and women had explored the natural world for centuries.
The Raid offered helicopter rides to the journalists to help them solve the complexity of the circuit, but the fawning and begging it took to snag a ride offended my pride. I resolved to cover the race only by car and by foot, and I took great joy in outsmarting the other journalists to find a given team deep in the forest or high on an alpine ridge.
At one stop, several men begged us to let them ride our boats so they could go somewhere else—anywhere else, out of their hopeless lives on the margin of famine.
The skeptic in me tends to see these media extravaganzas as gimmicks to raise funds for costly expeditions. As to whether almost three decades of hyperconnected adventure have built a public constituency to save the wilderness, I am also skeptical.
The ultimate swing toward purism emerged in the vogue of free soloing, or climbing without a rope or any gear—just man or woman against the rock, with a slip any farther than 80 feet off the ground a death sentence. Beginning in 2007, and still in the vanguard ten years later, a young Californian, Alex Honnold, has pushed this ultimate form of adventure far beyond what was previously thought to be possible.
Ironically, purism has been a reactionary thread in climbing since the first decade of the twentieth century, when an Austrian idealist named Paul Preuss declared that even the use of a
rope (let alone pitons) corrupted alpinism. He fell to his death from the Mandlkogel in 1913 at the age of twenty-seven. Preuss's aesthetic was considered so radical that he inspired very few imitators before the 1980s, when a handful of free soloists upped the ante on harder and harder routes.
Deliberate self-limitation has become the guiding principle in all kinds of adventure today, but in ways that fall far short of the purism of Paul Reuss. The trend is epitomized by
the Antarctic traverse on which Henry Worsley set out in November 2015. Skiing solo, Worsley chose not to accept a single resupply, which meant that all the food and gear he needed for his nearly three-month-long journey had to be carried on the sledge he hauled behind him.
In that encounter in the Bismarck Range on May 26, 1930, Leahy and Dwyer discovered the near edge of a vast highland population of tribes with no knowledge that any other people but themselves existed in the world.
The film Connolly and Anderson put together, titled simply First Contact, was nominated for an Academy Award. It remains, thirty-five years after I first viewed it, the most powerful documentary I have ever seen.
"I was terrified. I couldn't think properly, and I cried uncontrollably. My father pulled me along by the hand and we hid...They knew nothing of white-skinned men. We had not seen far places. We k new only this side of hte mountains. And we thought we were the only living people. We believed that when a person died, his skin changed to white and he went over the boundary to 'that place'—the place of the dead... Let's not kill them—they are our own relatives. Those who have died before have turned white and come back."
It was the men's first inkling that the highlanders, far from comprising a uniform culture, were partitioned into a complex patchwork of tribes that spoke mutually unintelligible languages, cleaved to different myths and cosmologies, and warred upon one another.
Hoping only for gold, Leahy and Dwyer had made the accidental discovery of a vast highland population of natives who until 1930 thought they were the only human beings in the world. Yet to Leahy and Dwyer, the voyage had been a failure, since they had found not a single stream bearing commercially viable traces of gold.
No lifeway in the world more neatly fills the niche of the "exotic" and the "unspoiled" than the Maasai of East Africa.
"We had one guy who was determined to end the practice of clitoridectomy. 'It has to happen sooner, not later,' he insisted. 'These women are being mutilated. We need to start a revolution all over Africa.'
"Well, I'm sorry, but you can't just walk into another culture ... and tell the Maasai, 'We can fix this for you.'
Mick Leahy himself indulged in couplings with highland women. In the 1980s, Connolly and Anderson interviewed several of these "paramours" in their old age.
When the Romans branded all the tribes that roamed the outskirts of their great empire "barbarians," they assigned themselves the righteous mandate of conquest. Inextricably bound up through the ages with the recognition of cultural differences are the dismal pageants of racism and xenophobia—currents that are alive and well in the United States in 2017.
But there is no point denying that torture of the cruelest kind played a central role in Apache culture. Well-documented testomony records that Cochise sometimes executed victims by hanging them head down over slow fires that inflicted agonizing deaths.
In Boulder, Colorado, in the late 1950s, I was regarded by my high school classmates as a geek because of my passion for the mountains. (The cool kids went skiing at Arapahoe Basin and Winter Park.) Nowadays, of course, Boulder is as sportif a town as can be found anywhere in the country, and rock climbers, who constitute a hefty percentage of the populace, wear their racks and chalk bags as insignia of the in-crowd.
Old-timers looking back on the playing fields of youth occasionally lament that a given range is "climbed out." The temptation to enshrine the years of one's prime as a golden age lies close at hand. If several hundred people—most of them clients on guided expeditions—can stand on the summit of Everest on a given day and snap selfies, it's hard not to regard big-range mountaineering as a travesty of what it meant to Hillary—or to Eric Shipton. Yet the climbing game remains in 2017 as vital in crucial respects as if it was half a century ago.
Before Alaska was admitted to the Union in 1959, the highest peak in the United States was Mount Whitney in California, at 14,505 feet above sea level.
Mount McKinley, named by a Republican prospector in 1896, was thought even then to be the highest peak in the Alaska Territory. That Denalli (the great mountain's official name since 2015) was also the highest point on the continent, at 20,310 feet, was established before the second decade of the twentieth century.
That Everest was the highest mountain in the world has not been seriously doubted since the 1930s.
In this book, I have dwelt on the ways in which exploration and adventure have been adulterated by the machinery of communication—cell and sat phones, radio, Internet—and by the rescue capability of airplanes and helicopters. Caving, almost uniquely, has been transformed virtually not at all by such modern inventions.
If I could start life over as an explorer, in 2017 rather than 1960, I think I might become a caver rather than a climber. But in my seventy-fourth year, with a cancer I cannot cure circumscribing every whim or ambition I might throw at the world, I can only dream of subterranean discovery. Still, it was dreamers who unlocked Huautla, who found the key to Kreubera...
According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, a resource compiled from several authoritative lexicons including the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "adventuren" first appears in English around the year 1300, as a verb meaning "to risk the loss of something." That original meaning catches the essence of what adventure means to me. Not just "risk," but "the loss of something." The adventurers celebrated in this book all risked their very lives to achieve goals, however arcane, that the rest of the world deemed too hazardous to pursue. Without danger, adventure is reduced to mere sport.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Canadian Arctic explorer and ethnologist, liked to claim that adventure was what happened when you screwed up. A sound explorer, in his view, pulled off his expeditions exactly as planned, with no tawdry melodramas spawned by avoidable mistakes. Yet the curmudgeonly Stefansson was belied by his own record, as during the disastrous voyage of the Karluk from 1913-16....
To push the question in another direction, one might argue that adventure is the luxury of a modern world, or at least of that part of the world affluent enough to escape routine threats of starvation, disease or ethnic oppression, in which ordinary life has become secure enough to take for granted. In that world, we seek out adventure, rather than having it thrust upon us as it was for Odysseus. pg 253
In was, as Frost had memorably said, playing tennis without a net.
Looking back at age seventy-three on my career as a mountaineer, I have to resist the temptation to deplore the current state of adventure as a tattered scrap of the abundance in which I reveled in my prime.
In Appalachia, Michael recounted the decision to give up.
I realize the mountain doesn't care who we are, why we're here, or what we've brought... We two grown men doing jumping jacks miles from anywhere, beneath a hunk of granite nobody really cares about, pistons of humanity bobbing down, fighting for enough warmth to stay alive. The climbing ceases to matter, and the movie, too. Sometimes, surviving is enough.
"I am surprised and pleased, in fact, that the hotshots of today express admiration for the climbs we made in the 1960s and 1970s. That some of our ascents have earned the label of "classic," let alone "breakthrough," fills me with pride. Climbers in general have a decent sense of history—as professional athletes do not. The great majority of major league baseball's current stars have little or no idea who Willie Mays was, or Hank Aaron. But the typical twenty-five-year-old making his mark in Yosemite in 2017 reveres and honors Royal Robbins or Lynn Hill.
In terms of the future of adventure, the ultimate frontier is outer space. pg 259
But even in my juvenile world of fulfillment, I knew deep down that humans would never get to Andromeda, let alone to the galaxies on the other edge of the universe that were fleeing from us at close to the speed of light. pg 259
Half a century later, I cling to my skepticism about space. The greatest mysteries of all lie hiddn among the stars, the strangest of all unknown worlds, and I hang on every new revelation hat scientists can wring from the cosmos.
The fear that there are no more undiscovered worlds to explore is an age-old bugaboo for restless adventurers. [goes on to describe Wilfrid Noyce]
Often now, in unbidden moments, a surge of grief washes over me, as I recognize that I will never hike Bowdie Canyon on the Dark Canyon Plateau, that I will climb the routes in the Dolomites that were on my tick list, that I may never travel (as I was sure I would) to South Africa or Thailand or Mongolia. But if there is recompense in that loss, it is the mandate the gift of each day thrusts upon me to assess what my life was all about. After all, no matter how soon I die, I've had at least seventy-three years on earth. Schubert, Mozart, and Keats were given less than half that span to pour their visions into eternity.
I think of myself—of my vocation—not chiefly as a writer, or a climber, or even a husband or a friend, but as an adventurer. This book represents my efforts to get at the core of the elusive phenomenon we call adventure, both past and future, both in the lives of explorers and in the wayward paths along which my own wanderlust has propelled me.
The temptation, especially for us Puritans, is to divine some higher purpose served by all those journeys into the wilderness, those vagabond rambles that at the time seemed pure fun or, as they grew sterner, pure compulsion. Climbers have long subscribed to a weirdly self-congratulatory distillation of the meaning of ascent. The most was set by Mallory who, bridling against the metaphor of mountaineering as conquest, penned his second most enduring apothegm in an essay published in the Alpine Journal in 1918: "Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves."
I remain deeply skeptical about the facile proposition that through the trials of extreme adventure we learn bedrock truths about ourselves. Climbing, along with other forays into wild places, has given me the most piercing transport of joy I have ever felt. But when I came home and tried to settle back into the petty pace from today to day, I would have been at a loss to articulate what I had learned about myself—or about any other important matter. Perhaps joy itself is the reward. Mallory said as much, in a less well-known quote about the purpose of ascent: "What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life."
The notion that adventure leads to the discovery of self is closely allied to the lazy but commonplace bromide that travel broadens the mind, that journeys to other lands open our eyes to the richness and diversity of the human condition. I'm skeptical, too, of this pious recipe. In my experience, travel often reinforces prejudice and xenophobia.
If I have found an endeavor that led me to a better understanding of myself, it was not adventure but psychotherapy.
But back to adventure. There is little point, I think, in trying to unearth an overarching purpose in our madness. We go off again and again on our voyages in quest of the undiscovered world because we cant' help it. We cannot claim that it does anybody besides ourselves any good. We are all, as Lionel Terray put it in the title of his autobiograpy, "conquistadors of the useless." Yet we share our outcast state with other pursuits that are equally useless but equally wonderful. As W.H. Auden wrote in "In Memory of W.B. Yates," "For poetry makes nothing happen."
I had always rather deplored the notion that one must sacrifice the active years of one's life to the dignity and comfort of old age... So the decision was taken, albeit with a feint heart." [Shipton]
Whatever the cost of spending half a life in adventure, I have few regrets about all the time and energy and passion I squandered trying to figure out how to get from the base of some mountain to the top.
From 1981 onward, I made my living as a freelance writer. One of the delights of my trade was the opportunity to plunge into the esoteric worlds of other people's passions. Because they were only too glad to have some magazine pay attention to the labors to which they devoted their lives, but of which the general public remained indifferent or unaware, those experts usually welcomed my intrusion.
The rupture of tearing myself away from the universe I had so briefly visited could be painful. And too often it damaged my self-esteem, as I wondered if I was, a professional dilettante.
If dabbling in the worlds that others think matter more than anything else in life is both the bane and the glory of the freelance life, what all those encounters gave me was a glimpse of the endless richness of adventure. I came away from each immersion filled with admiration for the men and women who counted the days before one more expedition into the heart of their mysteries.
... Susan Sontag nails this point: "Cancer is the 'killer' disease; people who have cancer are 'cancer victims.' Ostensibly, the illness is the culprit. But it is also the cancer patient who is made culpable."
The insidious truth about metastasized cancer is that no matter what kind of temporary stay the best care and the cleverest drugs can effect, the malady lurks in the body. And sooner or later it comes back. When it does, it usually appears in amore virulent guise. Of course, we must all die, and few are the endings that arrive as the ones we would script for an exit from this world.
What does adventure have to do with all this? For me, the days when I was afoot in the wilderness, headed toward some uncertain goal, were the ones when I felt most alive, furthest from death, even when mortality hovered over my shoulder, as it did on the most dangerous of my climbs. During those days, the precious spark of existence hummed in my fingertips. Though it may be a romantic delusion, I'd like to think that what we call the zest for adventure lies dormant in all human beings, numbed by the creature comforts of home and the tedium of the job. I'd like to believe that wanderlust is encoded in our DNA, the legacy of the countless eons we spent as nomadic hunter gatherers, when life itself depended on finding out what lay beyond the horizon, in the next valley over or on the other side of the high hill—so infinitely longer a span than the mere eleven millennia since our ancestors first turned to agriculture and tried to live in dwellings for more than a few weeks at a time. If my romantic notion has any merit, then it would recast "adventure" not as some exploit we choose to pursue, but as the response to an instinct embedded in our genes. It would help me understand why it's so hard to articulate what drove me to adventure and what it gave me in the end.
I take comfort in the fact that even the greatest explorers have been notoriously poor at explaining why they set off on their quests. Mallory's famous quip about Everest, "Because it's there," may be as good an asnwer as any.
Across the fifty-five years during which I pursued adventure in one form or another, companionship of the sort that Saint-Exupery extols has been the deepest reward, deeper even than, or rather inextricable from, the glory of a first ascent.
Deborah defeated us 2,000 feet below the summit. During the course of the forty-two-day failure, locked in grim silence next to each other in the too-small tent, roped together on every step we took across three unexplored glaciers, we slowly grew to hate each other. The very sound of Don's chewing as our rations dwindled sent me into a wordless fury, and he signaled his contempt for my days of weakness by shouldering his load and plodding onward. ...we parted that summer as enemies. But our bruised feelings slowly healed, and by the next summer we had organized yet another expedition, to Mount Huntington's west face.
Only a few years later, he [Jon Krakauer]and I would become comrades in writing, after I persuaded him to give up pounding nails to support his climbing habit and try crafting articles and books for a living instead.
... Saint-Exupery's "new vision of the world won through hardship." The forging of friendships too deep for words is almost never the reason we set off into the wilderness to probe the unknown. But in the end, it is what glows in memory.
holding off the Redcoats in 1775, the trail of Emerson's "shot heard round the world."
"still throbbing with the joys and terrors of the longest expedition I had gone on."
"take to the magic of the ascent."
"counter-phobic obstinacy"
Baring a catastrophic accident—a car crash, a house burning down, an avalanche scouring the face of a mountain—one partner will in all likelihood die before the other. It is a denouement impossible to prepare for. I saw it happen to my mother, who lived on for seventeen years after my father died in 1990.
The world outside me shrank and dimmed; all I cared about was taking the next breath. Though death might be happening to me, it seemed an abstract matter: a pity, no doubt, and a nuisance, but not a turn of events over which I had much control.
For one who does not believe in God, prayer is a waste of time. In its place, I have only hope, or wish.
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