The Siege of Shangri-La by Michael McRae

Author:Michael McRae [McRae, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7679-1392-8
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

BREASHEARS AND WILTSIE had to find transportation to drive to the Po Tsangpo. They arrived at the trailhead village after Fisher and his clients, who had already hired most of the available porters and had moved down to a meadow that offered the only level campsite in the area. The climbers found a couple of men willing to carry double loads for double pay. They reached the meadow as evening was approaching. Fisher was hunched on a rock and refused to talk to them.

That evening, Breashears and Wiltsie’s liaison officer got drunk in Fisher’s camp, which was only twenty yards away in the small meadow. The “L.O.” said the Geographic team’s porters were about to quit, because Breashears had told them to prepare to walk all night. The story seemed credible; there was an unusual amount of activity in the climbers’ camp. In Fisher’s mind, they were now locked in a race to be the first Westerners to stand at the confluence of the Tsangpo and Po Tsangpo since Kingdon-Ward and Cawdor’s day. (In fact, Ludlow and Sherriff had been there in the 1940s, and several independent travelers and scholars, beginning in 1986, had as well.)

Breashears and Wiltsie’s porters were not staging a mutiny at all; they had been bustling around to prepare for a predawn departure. At five o’clock the next morning, they broke camp and set off for the confluence. All seemed quiet in Fisher’s camp, but as the light improved, Breashears began noticing footprints on the muddy trail ahead of him: lug-soled Western hiking boots. “Fisher!” Breashears thought. He took off, hotfooting it down the trail.

Obsession can be a merciless taskmaster. Breashears set a manic pace, leaving Wiltsie and their two porters far behind. His pulse rose to one hundred and eighty beats a minute and stayed there for two hours. Wiltsie walked for four hours until he came across Breashears’ and their liaison officer’s packs, cached near the trail with a note attached: “We could not wait any longer for you. Have the porters carry these.”

But the porters, already carrying double loads, could not take any more weight. Wiltsie hefted the packs onto his shoulders—in addition to his own and his camera equipment—and set off. Fuming and sweating in the sweltering midmorning heat and humidity, his temper reached the boiling point. After struggling three thousand feet uphill to a ridge top, he dumped the two packs and buried them in the forest.

Breashears thought he was racing Fisher. In fact, he was trying to catch up with twelve-year-old Ry Larrandson and Sharon Ludwig, a friend of Larrandson’s mother. As the fastest hikers in Fisher’s group, they had been dispatched early that morning to beat Breashears to the confluence. Under cover of darkness and carrying flashlights, they had slipped through the opposition’s camp with Fisher’s hung-over liaison officer and were long gone by the time Wiltsie and Breashears hit the trail. The three powered seventeen miles in eight hours and reached the confluence at noon. Weary and blistered, but feeling victorious, they posed for a self-portrait.

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