Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer Page B

cleanup.
    Bringing clients back to Everest year after year, the guides had a stake in this that one-time visitors did not. As part of their expedition in 1990, Rob Hall and Gary Ball spearheaded an effort that removed five tons of garbage from Base Camp. Hall and some of his fellow guides also began working with government ministries in Kathmandu to formulate policies that encouraged climbers to keep the mountain clean. By 1996, in addition to their permit fee, expeditions were required to post a $4,000 bond that would be refunded only if a predetermined amount of trash were carried back to Namche and Kathmandu. Even the barrels collecting the excrement from our toilets had to be removed and hauled away.
    Base Camp bustled like an anthill. In a certain sense, Hall’s Adventure Consultants compound served as the seat of government for the entire Base Camp, because nobody on the mountain commanded more respect than Hall. Whenever there was a problem—a labor dispute with the Sherpas, a medical emergency, a critical decision about climbing strategy—people trudged over to our mess tent to seek Hall’s advice. And he generously dispensed his accumulated wisdom to the very rivals who were competing with him for clients, most notably Scott Fischer.
    Previously, Fischer had successfully guided one 8,000-meter mountain: * 26,400-foot Broad Peak in the Karakoram Range of Pakistan, in 1995. He’d also attempted Everest four times and reached the top once, in 1994, but not in the role of a guide. The spring of 1996 marked his first visit to the mountain as the leader of a commercial expedition; like Hall, Fischer had eight clients in his group. His camp, distinguished by a huge Starbucks Coffee promotional banner suspended from a house-size block of granite, was situated just five minutes’ walk down the glacier from ours.
    The sundry men and women who make careers out of scaling the world’s highest peaks constitute a small, ingrown club. Fischer and Hall were business rivals, but as prominent members of the high-altitude fraternity their paths frequently crossed, and on a certain level they considered themselves friends. Fischer and Hall met in the 1980s in the Russian Pamir, and they subsequently spent considerable time in each other’s company in 1989 and 1994 on Everest. They had firm plans to join forces and attempt Manaslu—a difficult 26,781-foot peak in central Nepal—immediately after guiding their respective clients up Everest in 1996.
    The bond between Fischer and Hall had been cemented back in 1992, when they had bumped into each other on K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. Hall was attempting the peak with his compañero and business partner, Gary Ball; Fischer was climbing with an elite American climber named Ed Viesturs. On their way down from the summit in a howling storm, Fischer, Viesturs, and a third American, Charlie Mace, encountered Hall struggling to cope with a barely conscious Ball, who had been stricken with a life-threatening case of altitude sickness and was unable to move under his own power. Fischer, Viesturs, and Mace helped drag Ball down the avalanche-swept lower slopes of the mountain through the blizzard, saving his life. (A year later Ball would die of a similar ailment on the slopes of Dhaulagiri.)
    Fischer, forty, was a strapping, gregarious man with a blond ponytail and a surfeit of manic energy. As a fourteen-year-old schoolboy in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, he had chanced upon a television program about mountaineering and was enthralled. The next summer he traveled to Wyoming and enrolled in an Outward Bound–style wilderness course run by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). As soon as he graduated from high school he moved west permanently, found seasonal employment as a NOLS instructor, placed climbing at the center of his cosmos, and never looked back.
    When Fischer was eighteen and working at NOLS, he fell in love with a student in his course named Jean Price. They