Master of Thin Air: Life and Death on the World's Highest Peaks by Andrew Lock & Peter Hillary

Author:Andrew Lock & Peter Hillary
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Adventurers & Explorers, Sports & Recreation, Mountaineering
ISBN: 9781628725735
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2015-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

8

A HIGHER GOAL

Mountains have a way of dealing with overconfidence.

Hermann Buhl

Climbing Everest was the realisation of a dream born in 1985 in the back room of a country pub. Having finally achieved it, what next? I hadn’t tired of climbing the big peaks—indeed, I enjoyed it more with each expedition. While the goal of summitting Mount Everest had finally been realised, my need for high altitude had in no way been sated. It was time for a new goal.

Despite my successes to that date, even with seven 8,000-metre summits under my belt, I’d never really considered attempting to climb all the 8000ers. It was the absolute grand slam of high-altitude mountaineering and has been likened to winning successive gold medals over numerous Olympics.

The early 1980s saw the first concerted effort by individual climbers to reach the summits of all of the 8000ers. The leader of that charge was the indomitable Reinhold Messner, a truly innovative and daring climber from the Tyrol in Europe. Messner had been the first to climb Everest solo and, with Austrian Peter Habeler, the first to climb it without oxygen. Messner’s goal was threatened, however, by a supremely tough Polish climber, Jerzy Kukuczka, who started the chase several years later but attacked the peaks in rapid succession and, on all but Lhotse, climbed either a new route or in winter. The race culminated with Messner claiming his fourteenth summit in 1986, while Kukuczka claimed his just a few months later.

A blog site called Everest Book Report, referring to the race by these extraordinary climbers, states that, “if Messner broke down the psychological barriers of 8,000 metre climbing, then Kukuczka was the man to break down the physical ones.” That sounds about right to me. Tragically, when Kukucka returned to Lhotse in 1989 to climb it by a new route, he was killed in a fall when his rope broke.

While Messner and Kukuczka were the first to climb “the fourteen” and their race was well publicised, there were other regular climbers in that era and the years following who claimed the Holy Grail. Even so, by the time I’d climbed Everest, only half a dozen of the world’s very best climbers had achieved it. I certainly didn’t consider myself to be in their league, but I started to wonder if maybe, just maybe, a boy from the suburbs of Sydney really could do it. To me, the end of one adventure has always been the starting point for the next one, and this would certainly be a major challenge. The more I thought about it, the more excited I was by the idea. And apart from a few risks like frostbite, death, bankruptcy and permanent bachelorhood, I couldn’t come up with any reason not to try. I decided to go for it. I called the project Summit 8000.

An important aspect of this project, though, was that it should be fun. While I lived for the challenge of climbing these mountains, I wanted the rest of the project to be as much fun as possible.

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