The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (48 page)

At any rate, the argument with the fixing team was one that Steck was willing to take some blame for. “What happened on the Lhotse Face—we can discuss this, what was wrong, what was right. No problem. But what happened at Camp 2, this was unacceptable. Even if we made a big mistake, it's no reason to try to kill three people.”

Steck seemed changed from when I'd seen him in March. He was subdued, speaking almost in a whisper, with an air of bafflement. Since the Camp 2 incident, he'd had a persistent headache. He was hardly sleeping, and when he did he had nightmares, which he'd never had in the past. “I'm fucked, eh?” he said. “Now I have to fix myself. I will seek professional help.”

He was surprised that several Western climbers who were friendly to him at base camp after the incident later wrote secondhand accounts on the Internet that were not only critical of him but full of what he and Moro have called false allegations and fabricated quotes.

Mike Hamill, of International Mountain Guides, the company that the fixing-crew chief worked for, wrote afterward, “The instigators were Simone and Ueli. Will these two be held accountable for inciting violence and for their cultural arrogance, or will there be a double-standard?” Garrett Madison, a guide with the commercial outfitter Alpine Ascents International, referred to an “unwritten rule” that climbers should stay off the face during the fixing day (whether this should apply to professional climbers, and not just commercial clients, for whom the ropes are intended, is arguable) and depicted the brawl as a regrettable shoving match rather than an attack by a mob. He too placed the blame for the incident on Moro and Steck. He asserted that after the confrontation on the Lhotse Face, Moro called down to Camp 2 on the radio, saying that he was ready for a “f——ing fight.” Simone Moro responded, when Madison posted his account, “It makes me crying to read that false, false, false and pure invented fact. I NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, did that radio call and provocation. (I have a lot of witness who can confirm.) Madison INVENTED those words to try to change the facts and give me responsibilities for the tension.”

Hamill and Madison also repeated the crew chief's charge that Steck had kicked ice down onto the fixing team. Steck told me, “This I know: there was not a single piece of ice falling on a Sherpa.” According to Moro and Griffith, a Sherpa who had been bleeding said later that he had not been hurt by falling ice; he had slipped and hit his face. Madison's account was called “the Sherpas' viewpoint”—he had talked to many of the Sherpas involved—but to some it read more like the viewpoint of someone with an interest both in placating restive employees and in reassuring future clients. “He just protects his business,” Steck said.

Eric Simonson, the co-owner of IMG, said last week that he shared Hamill's and Madison's point of view. “The commercial companies will put themselves solidly behind the Sherpas,” he said.

Two days after the incident, Sherpa leaders arranged a kind of peace meeting at base camp. The Western climbers and a handful of Sherpas signed a handwritten treaty stating that they'd forgiven each other and agreeing to work together in the future and abstain from violence. Its vagueness implies an equivalence between the Europeans' imprudence on the Lhotse Face and the attack in Camp 2—between name-calling, on one side, and sticks and stones, on the other. More than anything, it reflected a mutual desire, among the Sherpas and the commercial guide companies, to make the whole mess go away. Steck, Moro, and Griffith signed it, and though they did not necessarily want their attackers jailed (no one has been charged), they were pleased that several of them had been suspended from working on the mountain this season. At the base-camp meeting, Steck told me, “I saw that guy who punched me in the face, the chief from the fixing crew. I looked him in the eye and said, ‘You have stolen my dream. Please don't do that to another person.'”

Not long afterward, when Steck was back in Switzerland, Moro, who is a helicopter pilot, flew his helicopter up to the Lhotse Face, to recover the body of a Sherpa who'd fallen to his death. The Sherpa who loaded the body onto the helicopter was Mingma Tenzing, the rope-fixing chief. “When he saw me, he looked at me, then looked down,” Moro said.

Steck had thought his relationship with the Sherpas was a good one. Many with whom he'd summited the previous year had approached him at base camp, earlier in the expedition, to say how much they'd enjoyed climbing with him. “Some people treat the Sherpas really bad, like slaves,” Steck said. “I don't want to be the face for this. I never treated a Sherpa bad in my life.” After the Camp 2 incident, Denis Urobko, a Russian professional climber attempting a new route up the Southwest Face, posted his thoughts, in which he referred to some of the Sherpas as “cattle” and “pigs.” “Inexperienced and self-assured, Sherpa think it's in their right to dictate the rules and God have mercy if someone decides you sent him a ‘bad glance.'” Steck, whose team had been working with Urobko and his partner, Alexey Bolotov, told me that it was a great relief that Urobko hadn't been at Camp 2 the day of the attack. “It would have been a disaster,” he said. “Denis was in the Kazakh army. He's not a guy who would say, ‘Thank you, hit me again.'”

Steck and Moro have blamed Mingma Tenzing's initial pique on his exhaustion and frustration after working for two days in such extreme weather and his embarrassment over the fact that they were climbing so quickly, without Sherpa help. “He's a leader, he's losing face,” Steck said. “It's the worst thing that can happen in Asian culture.”

“The fixing team is the best of the best, the Sherpa A-team,” Simonson said. “These are proud men. They see themselves as every bit as good as anyone out there. Clearly, they felt disrespected and got really worked up over it. You go to a man's house and disrespect them, and, well—this is their house.”

Steck and Moro, by climbing alpine style, may appear to be self-sufficient, but they use the fixed ropes and ladders in the icefall, and they rely on porters to help establish their comfortable, well-appointed camps on the lower parts of the mountain. While they make videos for their sponsors of themselves hiking up to base camp in trail shoes and carrying only day packs, somewhere outside the frame Sherpas are lugging their batteries and cheese. This occasionally irks the Sherpas, whose indispensability is integral to their economic well-being.

Steck, like many others, has tried to view the incident in the light of the wider predicament of Everest: overcrowding, money, and, as a result, uneasy relations between Sherpas and Westerners, as well as between professionals and commercial operators. He considers himself to have been an accidental catalyst.

This year, on the Nepal side, there were almost 400 foreigners with climbing permits, and more than 400 Sherpas. An infamous photograph last year of a seemingly endless conga line of climbers trudging up the Lhotse Face via the fixed line conveyed the extent to which the mountain had become a circus. Last week, the wait to climb the Hillary Step, the last difficult pitch before the final summit ridge, was more than two hours.

Everest has evolved into a seasonal society dominated by the interests of the commercial guiding companies, which for the most part are owned and operated by foreigners. Clients pay as much as $110,000 apiece to be led up Everest. The companies in turn contract with the Sherpas, as porters, cooks, and mountain guides. A large portion of the clients' fees goes to bureaucrats in Kathmandu rather than to the Sherpas. They observe the foreigners with their luxury accommodations at base camp, their satellite phones and computers, and they know enough to wonder whether they're being gulled. If it's their house, how come they're not the ones who get to run it? The younger generation, in particular, may be less inured than their forebears to the paternalism inherent in the relationship with the
mikarus
, or “white eyes.” Walter Bonatti, the great Italian alpinist, suggested that the early conquest of the Himalayas was a kind of colonialism; if so, this may be the era of postcolonial blowback.

 

Melissa Arnot, whom Steck credits with saving his life, called in from base camp last week. A few days before, she and Tshering Dorje Sherpa, with whom she is climbing this season, had made it to 27,000 feet before high winds turned them back. (No one summited that day.) Arnot's goal this spring had been to summit twice; she was planning to head back up after a few days of recuperating at base camp. (Three days later, she made it.)

Arnot had been staying with Steck, Moro, and Griffith at Camp 2. The day they went up the Lhotse Face, she went down to the IMG camp and listened in as tempers flared over the radio. She is certain that Simone never challenged anyone to “fucking fight.” “Nothing Jon, Ueli, or Simone has said has been inaccurate,” she said. “It's all really sad. They were treated like criminals for doing nothing. The apology that's owed is one for the violence. They were forced to leave, ostracized, and their reputations were battered. The commercial expeditions owe them an apology.”

She went on, “These other accounts are embarrassing, claiming that Simone and Ueli and Jon are racist and classist. It's a bold and arrogant statement to make about people you don't even know.”

She said that one Sherpa who had been a friend now refused to look at her. Still, she added, “I don't think this is a rift between Westerner and Sherpa, or part of an underlying racial and cultural divide. This is a fight between boys on the slope.”

 

A few days later, I spoke on the phone with Dawa Steven Sherpa, the expedition leader for Asian Trekking, which is owned by his family and is one of just a few Nepali guiding companies. He is 29. His father is Sherpa, his mother is Belgian. He had helped arrange the base-camp meeting after the incident at Camp 2.

Dawa was in base camp on the day of the melee, but was in constant contact that day via radio with his two Sherpas on the fixing team. They too say they heard Moro say “fucking fight,” but Dawa allows that their English isn't perfect.

“Simone was out of order,” Dawa said. “He's a friend of mine, but he's a very fiery character. This had been building between Simone and the Sherpas for a while.”

He went on, “It's embarrassing to all sides. Now my clients are getting messages from their friends back home, saying, ‘I hope you're not fighting with your Sherpa.' It's very sad. For 50 years, the Sherpas have done so much for people. One small thing between a few egomaniacs, and now all the Sherpa are hurt. We feel betrayed and abandoned. The idea that Sherpas don't like Westerners? That's all bullshit.”

In the background, he occasionally joined a radio conversation in Nepali with some Sherpas who were breaking camp higher on the mountain. Every now and then, a helicopter landed nearby. He didn't much want to talk about the details of the incident at Camp 2. “That was unacceptable. I can't comment any further,” he said. But, he added, “I can completely understand how traumatized Ueli must've felt.” About Mingma Tenzing, the head of the fixing crew, he said, “He's the most quiet guy. A shy guy, doesn't ever ask for the credit. I was in shock to hear he was the forefront of this. I wasn't so surprised that Simone was involved. There's always something happening with him. Mingma is deeply embarrassed. He's very sorry. He knows he let down his family. But it's too late.”

Mingma wasn't speaking to the press. “The Sherpas are not very good at talking,” Dawa said. “We're workers. We don't want to talk. The best way to repair our reputation is to work.”

 

Steck's house is at the end of a narrow street lined with quaint Swiss homes and flower gardens, up on a slope, overlooking the village, the lake, and a broad set of cliffs that block the view of the Eiger. He built the house himself, with a crew (he is a carpenter by trade), and he and his wife moved in in January. It is spacious, by Swiss standards, with three stories and an underground garage, but it's simple and spare, a modern interpretation of a chalet, with lots of light woodwork and, on the walls, large-format photographs of famous peaks.

In his office, on the ground floor, next to a giant map of Everest, a calendar sketched out his year. The summer was empty; he'd expected to be recovering from Nepal. On a day in early September, he'd written, in tiny print, “Annapurna,” with a line going down through the rest of the month.

In March, he'd talked a lot about Bonatti, whom he admired perhaps above all others. Bonatti, on a winter morning in 1965, walked up to the base of the Matterhorn's North Face and climbed it by himself, a harrowing direct route that took him five days. Steck repeated the route seven years ago in 25 hours and spoke with wonder about the experience of placing his hands and feet where Bonatti had. A pitcher playing today can never know what it was like to strike out Ted Williams, but Steck could imagine himself in Bonatti's boots—the opponent was the same. After the climb, Bonatti, 35 at the time, abruptly retired from professional climbing, and became a journalist. He lived to the age of 81. In some respects, Steck admires this more than anything.

Steck knows that to live a long time you need to quit. Before Everest, he'd figured he had two more years in him of pushing the limits. Now he wondered whether he had less. He would always climb mountains; it was a part of his personality, and his marriage. But the professional part of it, the Swiss Machine, had gone a little sour. A week after Steck got home, Alexey Bolotov, the partner of Denis Urobko, was killed in a fall. A rope broke. They found his body on the Khumbu Glacier. He was 50 and had quit his job to devote himself to climbing. There's a part of Steck that wonders if the incident at Camp 2 wasn't in some respects a blessing. “Maybe there might have been a big accident,” he said. “There are a lot of things in climbing that you can't control.”