Climbing Mount Everest

By John Skow

Last fall the mountain known in Tibet as Chomolungma, or Goddess Mother of the World, and in the West as Everest permitted itself to be climbed by 33 people, withheld permission (in the form of benign weather) from a much larger number and killed nine climbers. Are those good odds or bad? A flatlander's question, an observer decides, after asking it of Stacy Allison and Peggy Luce; to mountaineers, the answer is a shrug. The odds are the odds. Allison, a contractor and house framer from Portland, Ore., and Luce, a bicycle messenger from Seattle, members of a U.S. expedition from the Pacific Northwest, were among the 33 summit climbers. More important, as these matters are reckoned, they were the first and second U.S. women in history to reach the 29,108-ft. top of Everest (among the 200-odd climbers who had summited before were six other women, beginning with Japan's Junko Tabei in 1975).

The drive to put a U.S. woman on Everest had been something between grail and financing gimmick for at least a decade. Everything -- gender, nationalism, internationalism, ever more dangerous routes, climbing solo and without oxygen, and climbing quickly with little equipment, "Alpine style" -- is a gimmick to Himalayan climbers, whose hobby is absurdly expensive. The most strenuous effort is not on the wind-racked ridges above Camp 4; it is in corporate conference rooms, where idlers with powerful legs try to persuade achievers in powerful suits to pay for their vacations.

At any rate, Allison, who was weathered out on Everest in 1987 after reaching 26,000 ft., then retreating and spending five days in a snow cave, was by several days the first of three climbers from her expedition to reach the top last fall. (A male climber, Geoff Tabin, made it to the top just ahead of Luce.) Thus she settled what she somewhat dismissively refers to as "the American-woman-on-Eve rest thing." (Tired of hype and of fund raising, she had put $9,000 of her own money into the expedition pot.) No doubt she also quelled some of the grousing from the Old Guard of male Himalayan climbers that women aren't equipped for extreme-high-altitude climbing, complaints that have subsided for the most part into gossip about the undeniable problems that love affairs cause on expeditions. (Allison herself does some grousing on this subject, and she says that one of the reasons her 1988 expedition was successful was that everyone understood the concept of delayed gratification.)

As Allison saw it, she and the mountain settled some unfinished business. That was that. But hype has a life of its own, and she was rewarded on her return with her country's equivalent of a knighthood, an interview on David Letterman's late-night TV show. She is little, blond and cute, and probably could have carried Letterman on her back to the top of the Statue of Liberty. His questions were gingerly and puzzled. She, as it happened, had never seen Letterman's show, but friends had explained its tribal rituals. No 19th century explorer snacking on pickled sheep's eyes could have honored bizarre local customs more graciously. She took a rock out of her pocket, explained that it came from the top of Everest, and asked politely whether she could heave it through the studio window. "Of course," said Letterman. She chucked it with a good sidearm motion, and there was the familiar sound effect of breaking glass that Letterman fans have grown to love. Fade to commercial.

Some weeks ago, as the press and TV uproar began to subside, the two women spent a couple of days sorting photos in the Portland house Allison shares with her boyfriend, a local doctor. Allison and Luce did not know each other before the expedition, and though they are friendly enough, it seems doubtful that their lives from this point will take them in similar directions. The contrast in character is too great. Even the extraordinary physical and mental strengths that each possesses are of sharply divergent kinds. Luce is a big, powerful, easygoing soul who for several years ran her own restaurant in Seattle. When the restaurant began to consume her life, she quit cold and took a job as a bicycle messenger. With nothing much in the way of climbing credentials, she volunteered for the Everest trip. "I've always wanted to do adventures," she says with a big grin.

Allison doesn't like that idea at all. For her, adventures are what happen when you make a mistake. She has been climbing, she says precisely, "for 11 1/2 years." She is a gifted rock climber. At extreme altitude, she is an aerobic marvel, renowned for climbing at unusual speed. She and the rest used bottled oxygen much of the time because of the dangers of altitude sickness. A reporter with some experience at altitude asks whether she felt sluggish and slow-thinking when she wasn't using oxygen. This is what he remembers and what virtually all climbers report. Not Allison; she said she had no problems, with or without oxygen. And clearly this is true; at the summit, which she reached without trouble, she spent 45 minutes waiting for her Sherpa and photographing herself with the logos of various corporate sponsors. Then she made an unbelievable descent all the way to Camp 1, at about 21,000 ft.

High winds battered the mountain on the day of Luce's summit try, and she hung back, breaking off from Tabin, her climbing partner, and her summit group's Sherpas. Then Luce (no relation to TIME's co-founder) decided to try for the top. At some point her goggles fogged, so she took them off. By that time the men had passed her on their way down. She reached the top alone, dulled and sluggish, and stayed about five minutes, not bothering with photos. As she started down, she realized her unprotected eyes were going snow blind. What she did not realize was that she had run out of oxygen. And on a steep slope just below the summit, she leaned over to try to see a foothold through the blazing retinal glare. The empty oxygen tank overbalanced her. She somersaulted downward.

Then strength and her adventurer's enchanted luck took over. She swung her ice ax, sunk it into the snow face and performed a perfect self-arrest, just the way they teach it in climbing school. She ditched the oxygen bottle and found her Sherpa. The only thing she could see by this time was the blue of his boots, so she followed the moving blue blobs. The next day her eyes were swollen shut.

Had the experience taken either woman into unexplored places in her character? "No," says Allison, not surprisingly. But then she adds, "Getting to the summit didn't. Winning's easy. Not getting there the year before did. Yeah, failure teaches you things." Luce says, "Maybe I'm calmer. Friends say I seem more mature. Maybe just tired." She and some partners heard the beat of great wings when they were cuffed by the edge of a large avalanche at the Khumbu Icefall. Being in peril, she says, "sharpens your senses for life."

"No, I don't think so," Allison says. She is not a contentious person, but she can't abide what seems to be imprecision. "That implies that people who don't climb don't feel life sharply. Children feel life sharply . . ." "O.K., you're probably right," says Luce amiably. "Strike that last answer." What next? Allison, the house framer, has gone back into contracting. She and her boyfriend want to spend a lot of time kayaking. And there is some $60,000 still owing (of the $250,000 total cost) on the expedition.

Luce has quit her messenger job. She and Carl Jones, a Seattle filmmaker, plan to pedal mountain bikes from Vladivostok to Leningrad, camping or sleeping in the houses of ordinary folk along the way, in a five-month tour starting in May. Four Americans and four Soviets will make the trip with cameras rolling, and then they will do a similar tour in the U.S. next year. The Soviets are enthusiastic, says Luce. Only one element is still uncertain. Right the first time. So it is back, with smile and mandolin, to the powerful- legs, powerful-suits scene. Back to those cold, cold phone calls to the vice president for sales and aggrandizement of Monstrocorp, or at least his secretary: "Have I got a marketing opportunity for you! . . ."