No Room at the Top

By John Skow

For mountain climbers the news over Memorial Day weekend was grim but not really surprising. At Yosemite Valley in California, the body of Derek Hersey, a renowned Alpinist whose unforgiving specialty was rock-wall climbing done solo and without the protection of belays, was found below Sentinel Peak. And on Alaska's Denali (Mount McKinley), descending unroped in darkness down an icy chute called Orient Express, Charles Cearley, 40, a mountaineer from Seattle, fell 3,000 ft. and died.

The one-paragraph stories that appeared in most of the nation's press didn't tell much. As usual, Hersey, 36, an Englishman who lived in Boulder, Colorado, had been climbing alone. No one knows what went wrong, at what height, on a route that should have been relatively easy for him. It was a private death, leaving too few scraps to make a puzzle. Cearley's fall seems easier to understand. He and two companions had made the arduous climb to the 20,320-ft. summit and back down to 18,500 ft. As they stopped to rest and rope up, Cearley, who was not using his ice ax, lost his balance and slid away.

Other climbers read such details and shrug. Mistake or mischance, there is nothing useful to say. This is not because the deaths are meaningless but because their meaning seems alarmingly personal. They raise the sort of dust that stirs in every mountaineer's sheaf of recollections: soft snow breaks out from under your boots on a steep slope. You slide, gaining speed. Then some mountain god flips a coin, and it comes up heads. You stop sliding, safe as a baby, a few yards above a long drop. Nothing to say.

Another event of two weekends ago, however, the opening of Sylvester Stallone's ridiculous rock-jock thriller Cliffhanger, left lots to say. For one thing, the movie is set in Colorado but was filmed in Italy. The towering white needles of the Dolomites don't look anything like the massive peaks of the Rockies, and . . . ah, the hell with it. What really irks is that all the heroics, the nifty pendulum swings and the human-fly action below the 40-ft. overhangs, are sure to bring more flatlanders into the mountains.

The sorry truth is that too many climbers are there already, at least on the big-name peaks. At the time Cearley fell to his death on Denali, 489 other climbers were somewhere on the famous mountain, America's highest. During the week just before, 147 had reached the summit. "Believe it or not, sometimes it can get kind of crowded up there," says Denali park ranger Kathy Sullivan.

Crowds are worse on Colorado's 14,255-ft. Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park. Last year some 29,000 hikers reached the top, a rise of 53% since 1990. This is a nose-to-tail wilderness experience. Permits are assigned by lottery to climb Mount Whitney, above California's Owens Valley, at 14,494 ft., the highest summit in the Lower 48 states. The limit is 50 people a day in the favored period of late summer, and by the end of April all the slots were assigned.

A contrarian will point out, reasonably, that if you don't insist on Denali, you can have the rest of Alaska's mountains to yourself. Complete solitude is a little harder to find in the Lower 48, but it's there, at least in the West. If you are willing to carry your house on your back, turtle-fashion, the entire Western high country is yours for ski mountaineering. Perhaps because tent, stove, food, fuel and avalanche beeper weigh 65 to 70 lbs., you and your partner are likely to have the horizon to yourself, with (the thought occurs spontaneously after a seven-hour, 4,000-ft. climb) no other fools in sight.

That's now. But George Bracksieck, editor of Rock & Ice magazine in Boulder, estimates that 100,000 new climbers are entering the sport each year. Gear sales and Interior Department figures suggest that 4.1 million people across the nation do some variety of mountaineering each year. Many of the newcomers arrive, wearing Lycra, by way of the local indoor climbing walls. Some won't get far from their cars, but others will sniff the wind blowing from the back country. Accident figures and rescue costs will rise.

They can sound fairly impressive now, though trends based on small numbers are inherently fluky and dollar figures may depend on what point a bureaucracy's accountants want to make. In the 13 parks of the Rocky Mountain region, there were eight fatal climbing accidents and 63 rescues last year (total cost: $179,000) and six deaths and 40 rescues (cost: $247,000) the year before. In the Western region national parks, including Yosemite, there were no fatalities and 103 rescues last year, and one fatality and 56 rescues in 1991. Rescues there were far more expensive, at $1,135,000 for '92 and $1,284,000 for '91. Park Service expense accounts aside, as any climber knows, most of the risk and sweat of mountain rescues in the U.S. is borne by amateur volunteers. To a considerable extent, climbers look out for themselves.

But a disastrous spring last year at Denali set the rumblings of change in motion. Eleven climbers died on the mountain in May 1992 alone. A task force was convened to review climbing rules in U.S. parks. The consensus, says Butch Farabee, a former Park Service emergency-services coordinator who chaired the group, was that "we should recoup costs. Rescuers are hanging their own rears out in the wind anytime they undertake a rescue. Some of these climbers need to be held more responsible." One proposal is that, beginning in 1994 at Denali and Washington's Mount Rainier, some sort of bonding arrangement be imposed on climbers to pay the cost of their own rescue (as well as of high- altitude sanitation cleanup).

Park Service "smokeys" tend to be crowd-control specialists, while mountaineers tend to be sentimental anarchists, so the latter may view Farabee's remarks with high suspicion. Does "need to be held more responsible" hint that another shoe is about to drop, this one on mountaineers' grand, airy freedom? The phrasing sounds grumpy and disapproving. Rescuers' rears will hang out no matter how rescue costs are paid. Will there be an official effort to check climbers' credentials, now nonexistent?

Bonding sounds ominous, if it means posting big bucks to be forfeited (as with a bail bond) in case of calamity. But it would be hard to argue against voluntary hiking-and-climbing insurance, perhaps offered at modest extra cost along with park entrance fees. In Austria insurance comes with membership in the Alpine Club, which costs little and also gives unlimited opportunity to climb with experts.

Going into the mountains involves some degree of deadly risk. Hypothermia can kill you on an August day in New Hampshire. Avalanches can rumble down in the Rockies from the first October snowfall through June. Mountains are complex places, easy to get lost in.

Splendid talk about freedom can't argue this away. There is no reasonable way to justify risking your life in the mountains. You climb at the mountain's sufferance, and get back down if the mountain lets you. Why this is important is not clear, especially to those of us who do it. Once, in a pompous mood, I wrote, "We climb for the same reason that smoke rises and poodles bite doormen: it is our nature." This is baloney, but true baloney. The expert strung out below a featureless overhang knows it, and the ignorant weekenders who get in trouble are, for good or ill, plodding toward some such understanding.

With reporting by David E. Thigpen/New York