Wide Angle: A Karakoram Confession

I just thought this was a fantastic piece. I wish I could have written it myself. It's about the bigger picture and why just getting to the top of a mountain isn't the most important thing. How is this relevant to Moving Mountains? This article is about a man who was inspired by the mountains to move mountains.
-Lizzy Scully

By Jeremy Frimer

I’m not the first person to get cold feet upon arrival in the Karakoram. Not only is there cold, exposure to weather and altitude, and falling rock and ice of which to be weary; illness and the notorious gatekeeper that is the Karakoram Highway defend access to the big peaks of the Karakoram. So who wouldn’t be scared?

But now, in the era of George W. Bush, getting to the Karakoram requires passage through a deteriorating political gauntlet—“the world’s most dangerous place” . We arrive in Islamabad the night that Pakistan’s military storms the Red Mosque. Contrary to what our popular media convey, the vast majority of Pakistanis are politically moderate and tolerant of different peoples—91% see suicide bombings as unjustifiable, and this figure is up from 67% in 2002 . Backed by popular support, President Musharraf takes measures to crack down on the schools that breed extremism by requiring all religious schools to register with the government. The Islamabad-based Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) leaders refuse to do so and a stand-off ensues. Just five kilometers from where we sleep that night, negotiations break down, tanks roll in, and the stand-off ends in bloodshed. Mortar sings lullabies; gunfire counts sheep.
Loyalists to the Red Mosque descend upon the Karakoram Highway to vent fury and retaliation. Pakistan has become a major battleground between radical Islam and Western imperialism. Overnight, the world becomes a less tolerant, less peaceful place. But we have important business here (ahem); Good weather allows us to fly over the blockades in a jet plane and continue towards our mountain.

Strangely enough, political, logistical, and mountainous danger has only tangential relevance to my shilly-shallying. This is my 13th expedition in 10 years; I feel ready to contend with whatever lies ahead. But the rush that I once got from discovering something new or doing something that I previously didn’t see as possible has dulled. Somehow, I’ve become one of those commentators that survived the deadly first five years of his climbing career, got away with some stupid decisions, lost some friends that didn’t, and remembers vividly when Nirvana smelled like teen spirit.

I find myself in the Karakoram again—this time, not out of passion, but instead out of habit. I secretly hope that seeing our objective will rekindle a flame for this sport.
Seventy kilometers to the east of K2, Broad Peak, and the Gasherbrums are the Latok and Ogre peaks—they form a tight, isolated cluster up to 7300m in height. Tucked under the west face of Latok II is our objective: an unclimbed, unattempted 6500m rocky bastion that we dub “Latok II¾”. Its west face stands 1500m tall, a wall of near-vertical granite. We brashly plan to link the features of least resistance in alpine style. Indeed, audacious plans are my norm: I pick something that I think is just out of my realm of possibility and along the way, become the climber that can pull it off. The process gives me a transcendental taste, the feeling that I am, in some sense, irreversibly transformed for the better in its passage.

Our logistical guide is Little Karim, a “five-foot-nothing” legend and local of the Karakoram. He has climbed with most of the big names in Karakoram climbing, has stood atop K2 nine times, Broad Peak four times, and made another seven ascents of the Gasherbrum peaks. In fact, he has done more Karakoram expeditions than anyone else in history, and only once had a minor headache from altitude. By Reinhold Messner’s standards, he was one of the strongest climbers above 8000m on the planet. And he learned to climb by watching what the white guys were doing on his first K2 expedition with Chris Bonington and Doug Scott. Not only has he no formal alpine climbing training, he never went to any sort of school, and is completely illiterate. He lives under the long shadows of Masherbrum in the type of destitute poverty that is typical in Pakistan—a dirt shack packed with family, chickens, and cattle. In his prime, he could make it home from K2 basecamp in a day. But he has paid a price for his lifestyle: by the age of 56, he has lost some 160 friends to the Karakoram. In 1999, Voytek Kurtyka pleaded him into retirement before the Karakoram called him number 161.
In quitting, he lost the most significant source of meaning in his life. Running this small guiding company, he now struggles to make his life make sense. He’s put on weight. And, months before, as he puffed at the 5000m scarcity of atmosphere of Broad Peak’s basecamp, his normally joking, light-hearted spirit became lost in heavy nostalgia. He sat on a boulder outside of camp and cried.

I struggle to keep up as he hops along the loose rubble that is strewn about the Uzun Brakk Glacier. As we reach its middle, we see Latok II¾ for the first time in three dimensions. After traveling 15,000km and creating some 1700kg of greenhouse gases in reaching its base, I gaze at its snow-plastered flanks and know in my gut that I want no part of it. I can pick the thing apart into achievable chunks, reason a line through each, glue them back together, and narrate a grand strategy. But I know deep down that Latok II¾ isn’t a “go” for me. I fear disappointing my team mates; fortunately, they see its snowy condition and dismiss it as well before I embarrass myself.

Soon enough, we are planning a real objective. My ambivalence to the Karakoram is no longer concealable. Ken, Sam, and Ryan all want the northwest ridge of Latok II. Some 2100m high, the ridge is a massive alpine undertaking. The ridge’s primary challenge is in exposure, altitude, and commitment. It looks like a harder version of some of the ridges that I climbed on Mt. Logan—the East Ridge and the Orion Spur. I feel prepared and able to manage its challenges. Only, I strangely feel no urge to be on its flanks. What’s going on with me? Have I sold out my adventure spirit to the comfort and security of a stable job, a steady girlfriend, and a neurotic cat named Trango?

I reason through my disinterest in Latok II. The danger and commitment that comes with the ridge are what make it nonsensical to me. Given all the recent snowfall, the conditions are ripe for avalanches and cornice drops. The weather has been predominantly unsettled or poor thus far; getting high and committed on a mountain during a brief stable spell feels foolish to me. I secretly know that I could just as easily spin a tale with the opposite conclusion. The motivation behind my explanation remains unclear to me.

I find fancy with a 1200m tall south facing rock buttress on a 5750m peak near Latok II¾. I try to politick one of my expedition mates into joining me while the other two try Latok II’s snowy ridge… to no avail. After a week of frustration, sitting out heavy and steady rain, the sun finally shines. I sit alone in advanced base camp below Latok II, watching my teammates start up the ridge without me. In retrospect, will I see this decision in the same light as Kai’s prophetically last-minute call to not join John and Guy on the Devil’s Thumb, the climb that ended in tragedy? Or will I see this in the same light as Jay’s decision to not join Sam, JC, and me on our first ascent of Trango II’s Severance Ridge—the most rewarding adventure of my life?

Ken develops attitude sickness low on the route, forcing a retreat. The three agree that Sam and Ryan will make a second try. Meanwhile, Ken and I rack up, grab a single sleeping bag, a stove, and a light tarp for shelter, and start up the sunny rock of P5750. Our style is fast-and-light, not out of some desire to impress the purity pundits at Alpinist magazine but instead because it’s the way we like to have fun. The notion of lugging ropes and spending weeks on a mountain-side sounds more like work than play to me.

We set out to piece together the easiest line we can find. Around each blind corner, we find another miraculous crack system. Around each wall is a ramp, a chimney, or a hand crack. We reach a sandy ledge at ⅔ height as night falls, melt ice, lie down, and watch the clouds roll in. By late morning, we reach the base of the final headwall: a steep castle of buttresses, gendarmes, and recesses. We try our usual traversing trick, only to get stumped for the first time. Ken grabs the sharp end, following a line of weakness into unprotectable slab country high above an ankle-crushing ledge. He backs off. We traverse into a snowy recess and I take over the lead, finding a hidden ramp behind an ominous gendarme, which gains us access to the final summit cone. Ken takes over again and leads us to the summit of our new route—The Outside Penguin.

Snow begins to fall. We had scoped two lines of descent beforehand, but each is less accessible than anticipated. We resign ourselves to the arduous task of rappelling over a kilometer back down our route. A blizzard catches us immediately. Snow sticks, melts, and soaks. Still near the summit, we hide under our light tarp, close our eyes (not to be mistaken for sleeping), and wait for dawn.

The descent the next day is slow and deliberate. We stay patient, searching out solid anchors, and make methodical progress as the snow melts to rain. We reach the base, having taken on much water, and leaving behind some 40m of rap slings, many nuts and pins, and the tail end of what will be the final high pressure system of our expedition. I am grateful for our making the most of what the weather allowed, for the opportunity to live out a vivid experience with a friend, and for our safe return. But unlike after past expedition experiences, I feel disappointingly untransformed.
______________________________________________________________

My unraveling began a few weeks before the expedition. My good friend, Vance Culbert, was in town for a visit between jobs. Since the Coast Range ski traverse in 2001, Vance’s focus moved from the Alpine to humanitarian work. Just back from overseeing the basic welfare of one million people who sought refuge from the genocide in Darfur, Vance would soon be en route to negotiations over child soldiers in Uganda. During his visit, we met up for a day on sunny rock in Squamish. On the drive up, he told me about life in Africa and about the stubborn refusal from western nations to provide the small intervention necessary to prevent genocide and end the conflict. It was as if he was speaking about climbing, only the content was altered. Metres above sea level became head counts; crux moves on rotten rock became crux negotiations with corrupt officials; cold became heat; but the threat of harm was unchanged. The difference to me was that the outcome of Vance’s leads meant more than just personal fulfillment or height on a cliff; human lives were hanging in the balance.

Then he listened to my story, to my aspirations, to my confusion with my life. After finishing a degree in Engineering physics, I struggled to spin a story about how an engineering career would have a measurable impact on some of the things about which I cared most. I questioned the urgency of the “need” for stronger, cheaper steel in a world of materialism, pre-emptive war, cultural imperialism, and disease. Feeling an urgency to become a player in real progress, I stepped away from engineering and began grad school in research psychology. I now study how moral motivation develops while keeping an eye out for how my research could influence education and social policy. How climbing now fits into my new life, I was no longer certain. “I don’t see you doing expeditions in five years,” Vance prophesized.

None of this makes any sense. I had always seen “retiring” from climbing as a euphemism for selling out, being on the outside of something awesome. Since those idealistic university days in the Varsity Outdoor Club at UBC, many friends have dropped out of the dirtbag, “purist” lifestyle, and become high-earning, metrosexual yuppies. I swore myself to never fall into the money trap, I swore to remain pure at heart. I was dedicated to my sport, to my lifestyle, and to all that it represented.
And now I drive up to Squamish with Vance and wonder what it really means to be on the outside. What exalts “the climbing life” over the life that is concerned for humanity? By questioning climbing as the be-all-and-end-all of life, am I selling out or am I buying in? Vance and I arrive at one of my favorite climbs, The Great Game. I’ve climbed it a dozen times but when I reach its base, the rock feels different, strange. I lead the first pitch, feeling calm, confident, and in control. But when I reach the crux, I fall off as my concentration flutters towards Africa.

Perplexed, I search for some understanding of what in the hell is going on with me. What has happened to my zeal for climbing? Why does the rock feel different? Why am I distracted by Africa? I am reminded of a taxonomy about which my friend Kelly Cordes told me. His idea is that when we start climbing, we are drawn by the excitement, the movement, the air, the acrobatics, and the athleticism. These are all instances of what Kelly calls “Type I Fun”—the traditional type where it’s actually enjoyable during the act.

As one develops as a climber, he/she ventured into more challenging, colder, and more complex places where suffering begins. Climbing loses its innocence and one has a harder time explaining it to relatives. But afterwards, one would look back at the adventures as if they were fun. This is what Kelly calls “Type II Fun”—fun only in retrospect.

But then ambitions continue to evolve into a place where pulling off something crazy in the Alpine had weight unto itself, and was rewarding even in the absence of enjoyment. One walks away from adventures still terrified by where he/she had been and shudders at the thought of memories of close calls. But climbing is still somehow rewarding. This is what Kelly calls “Type III Fun”—not fun at all. (Kelly’s taxonomy ends at Type III Fun. I propose a “Type IV Fun”—Postmodern Fun—which is, by definition, difficult to describe.)

Thinking about what motivates these types of fun, Type I makes good sense to me. The immediate reward from doing an act serves to reinforce the pursuit. But what leaves me perplexed by Kelly’s taxonomy is why I would ever be compelled to pursue Type II and Type III Fun adventures in the first place. Given that neither of them are rewarding in the simple, pleasurable sense, there must be some other form of reinforcement built in. Reflecting over my past adventures, I sifted past all the pleasure, searching for any other nectar that I sought in the hills. And I noticed that the items of my list fit loosely into four “baskets” of goodness. As I examined these baskets, I began to see where my interest in climbing had gone and why my passions over the Red Mosque and child soldiers had emerged.

What brought me to climbing was an interest in the first basket: The Personal. I think back to that feeling of flow that comes after pulling off something at the edge of what I previously thought was impossible. Personal development is the transformation that comes with pushing myself to my limit. It is freedom, creativity, personal exploration, and self-knowledge. An introspective person by nature, climbing offered me what seemed like opportunity for development without end.

But before long, I felt limited by climbs where I could anticipate what lay ahead. To advance my climbing, I needed to venture into unexplored terrain. New routing became my drug. Grant proposals would ask about the significance of my proposed new route, which struck me odd. I had never thought of a new route as being significant in any real sense. But the folks behind the Mugs Stump Award are authorities; they must know what they are talking about. This led me to identify the second basket of goodness: Conquest. This basket represents venturing into the unknown, the final frontier, and going “where no man has gone before.” Picture Norgay and Hillary on Everest, Mallory’s “because it’s there”, and the Russian Big Wall project sieging the daylights out of Jannu.

Steve House has been a vocal critic of the singular goal of conquest. Cutting through his slander, his main point seems to be that doing something of note not only means climbing a big, unconquered beast, but slaying it with grace. This basket of Purity tells us not so much what to do but how to do it. It tells us what is kosher and why a splitter crack is so beautiful. It helps us tell a red point from a pink point and alpine style from the siege. It tells us that style counts and that less is more: gear is in, bolts are out; fast is in, heavy is out; leashless is in, spurs are out; and it ain’t over until you reach the “tippy-top”. The rules of purity are ever-changing conventions that predefine for us what it means to do something properly, the climber’s subjective experience of the climb aside.

The fourth and perhaps least prevalent of baskets in Alpine climbing is that of Community. Beyond concerns for conquest, purity, and the personal, the ethic of this basket is about the meaning that exists between people. Often, it comes with pleasure enough to qualify as Type I Fun but sometimes connecting with others comes as a sacrifice. Good examples include: showing a friend the ropes; allowing a partner to take an extra lead as Giardia eats away at my insides; or building a school in Pakistan. The point of this basket is that we are each better off if we share our existence, if we empathize with another’s plight, if we function as a unit.

Of course, any single Alpine adventure draws from several baskets. The point of drawing these distinctions is not to figure out which adventure falls into which basket. Rather, the point is to get real about the legitimacy of my motives in Alpine climbing and my life in general.

With a wide angle view, I wonder about what really counts in this world. Regarding my expedition to Pakistan, what statistic measures its purity: the 15kg of gear in my climbing pack on The Outside Penguin or the 3400kg of greenhouse gases that I produced in air travel? Or did I make up for the lack of purity by mightily vanquishing a Karakoram mountain? Beyond my own jollies, what real good does my conquest do for the betterment of humanity, for little animal critters, or for the planet that sustains us? Do conquest and purity make this world a better place in any meaningful sense? With the minor exception of the few (e.g., Sir Edmund Hillary) that inspired the many to pursue their own dreams, conquest and purity seem to be a great distraction from the real deal on planet earth.

The personal and community baskets are where I see the real goodness in Alpine climbing. Personal development builds the essential character that later becomes the foundation for making some good use of myself. Alpine climbing was: the venue for me to explore; the opportunity to discard convention and think for myself; the challenge that demanded that I persevere; and the confusion that drew out creativity. It seems as though Little Karim and I have focused much of our lives on the baskets of the personal and conquest; we now turn to community for future meaning.

As I arrived in Pakistan, my angst came from the emptiness of my basket of community. I look around and see people like Vance—now the country director for Norwegian Refugee Council in Ivory Coast—I see people like Greg Mortenson, founder of the Central Asia Institute (which has created 61 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan), and I see people like Lizzy Scully who put up Bad Hair Day (.12a) in the Bugaboos but has also founded Girls Education International (promoting education of underprivileged girls in places like near Little Karim’s village in the Karakoram). They are each promoting causes that count to me. But I see that these community endeavors are not just a sideshow for them; it’s as if they have become the central axis of their lives. And I think I understand why I arrived in Pakistan wondering what I was doing there.

I would like to thank Mountain Equipment Co-op and the American Alpine Club Lyman Spitzer Award for their generous support.

Summary: The Outside Penguin (V, 5.10, A1, M3, 1200m). F.A. Jeremy Frimer, Ken Glover. July 30–Aug 1, 2007. Peak 5750, Panmah Muztagh, Karakoram, Pakistan