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I'm posting the story below for everyone who shares my fascination with true tales like "Into Thin Air," that illustrate the human capacity for survival and the compulsion of the desk-bound to confront unnecessary risks.
What other achievement takes so much out of a person and accomplishes so little? I'll admit, I'm envious of people who can demand this much of themselves; a trek to base camp would have me begging for a bubble bath and a hot pizza. Still, when I read stories like this I can't help wondering what lasting things might have been accomplished by people with such incredible focus and strength of will.
Since 1996, the disastrous year documented by Jon Kraukauer in, "Into Thin Air," Mt. Everest seems to have become Hubris Central for desk-bound executives with lots of time and expendable income. The presence of unfit climbers poses a danger to everyone on the mountain. But for a price, almost anyone can find a guide willing to drag or carry him to the summit - and maybe abandon him there.
Like "Into Thin Air," this stranger-than-fiction account in the Washington Post features a climbing guide with no ethics; in this case, he is accused of having faked his credentials by posting another climbers's summit photos on his website - photos stolen from the climber's gear while others completed a rescue mission.
WTF?
It's not as if there was a record-setting climb in the balance, or even a shoe contract. What kind of person enjoys stolen glory?
His 69-year-old client became the second-oldest man and oldest American to summit Everest.
------------------
The Dark Side of the Mountain
When a doctor reached the peak of Everest, he celebrated with his guide and crew. So why was he left to die?
By Michael Leahy
Sunday, November 28, 2004; Page W12
Nils would realize how nervous she'd be, she thought. He'd call, he'd call soon.
Gladys Antezana lay in a Baltimore hospital bed, resting after minor surgery. Her husband was halfway around the world at that moment, and her questions about his safety and precise whereabouts had her on edge. At 69, Nils Antezana was attempting that day, May 18, to become the oldest American to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the highest point on the planet. It was a trek accompanied by considerable risks, Gladys knew. But Nils had climbed many mountains before, and, at the end of such expeditions, he had nearly always called Gladys as soon as possible, to tell her he was safe. Aware that she would be awaiting his call in the hospital, he had promised to be in touch quickly after his triumph. She expected his call to come at any minute. But it didn't.
Her anxiety grew. That day passed, and then the next, and still no phone call came from either her husband or his mountain guide, an Argentine named Gustavo Lisi.
Finally, she says, on May 20, at about 11:30 a.m., Washington time, her cell phone rang.
"It's Gustavo," said the voice.
She sensed immediately that there had been an accident. Before Gladys could speak, Gustavo Lisi plunged ahead. "Nils and I summited," she remembers Lisi saying.
"Where is my husband?" Gladys demanded.
He had a terrible accident, a catastrophe, Lisi said.
Gladys couldn't speak.
He stayed there on the mountain, she remembers Lisi saying. He couldn't come down, Gladys. But he was extremely happy, elated. It was so beautiful.
"Did you send someone up for a rescue?" Gladys says she finally managed to ask.
No, she recalls Lisi telling her. Nils couldn't have survived up there.
Why didn't you send someone up? she snapped.
Because I was sick myself, Lisi answered.
Lisi then shared, Gladys recalls, what he said were some of her husband's last words. "Nils said, 'I want to stay here. The mountain is my home.' "
For a moment, she could not think.
She recalls Lisi emphasizing that he had pleaded with Nils to continue moving. She recounts that he told her: "I said to him, 'Nils, you have a family. Let's go. Come on.' "
But Nils couldn't move or even respond, Lisi said. He added that Nils had been a wonderful friend, concluding, "He was happy at the end."
Before saying goodbye, the guide asked Gladys where he should send her husband's personal effects.
Lisi wouldn't need to send Nils Antezana's effects anywhere. He wouldn't need to do a thing because Antezana's daughter, Fabiola, would be flying to Katmandu, Nepal, within four days to get both the effects and a meeting with Lisi, during which she would demand an explanation for what had happened. What she had heard in telephone calls made to other climbers led her to believe that Lisi had made mistakes no guide should make, and therefore was responsible at least in part for her father's death. Fabiola knew she wouldn't be bringing her father back, but she wanted to leave Katmandu with the truth about how his dream went awry.
HIS FAMILY AND FRIENDS HAD ALWAYS CONSIDERED NILS ANTEZANA TO BE FULL OF SECRETS AND SURPRISES. He had a pilot's license and a plane, but his close friend Nick Ellyn never knew about either. For a long while, his flying buddies, with whom he co-owned the single-engine Cessna, knew little about Antezana's mountain climbing. Until after Antezana left for Everest, his wife had no idea that he had climbed a peak in Bolivia during a visit there a month earlier. "He was missing for four days, and I was asking people where he was," Gladys Antezana remembers. "[A relative], who heard it from somebody else, finally told me . . . I don't know why he didn't want me and others to know, but sometimes he was that way."
David Antezana, the couple's oldest child, saw the secrecy as a reflection of his father's desire for control over a few parts of his life. "He did a great deal for our family and other people," David says, "and I think he wanted something that belonged just to him. Many proud men are that way. They have things that are their own secrets."
For more than two decades, Nils Antezana had been the chief of pathology at Jefferson Memorial Hospital in Alexandria, but when the hospital closed in 1994, Antezana did not rush out to reacquire an executive title, contenting himself instead with doing pathology work for a variety of medical offices and offering consultations at a local hospital.
He was an immigrant who had received his medical training in Bolivia and then, although he spoke limited English, passed a U.S. exam to win his medical license in his new country in 1963. During his off hours, Antezana provided free treatment to patients in many of Washington's impoverished neighborhoods. Eventually, he brought his volunteer work into his home, where he set up an auxiliary office to treat the sore throats and flus of the poor, and examine economically squeezed cancer patients looking for a free second opinion, sometimes spending 30 hours a week treating the needy, apart from his normal job. He was indefatigable.
Then came the closure of Jefferson Hospital, and for the first time in his life, Antezana had time on his hands. While continuing his charity work, he learned to scuba dive. He windsurfed and did some hang gliding. He got in a harness once with a sky diving instructor and jumped out of a plane at 14,000 feet. But nothing absorbed him as much as his new passion for scaling mountains, a pursuit that began with modest treks in the United States but soon took him out of the country. He climbed mostly in South America -- renowned peaks that, while not nearly as high as Everest, were the tallest on the continent.
He threw himself into his workout and climbing regimens, confident that he could slow down his aging process as he moved through his sixties. He did not like talk of his age. His daughter did not even know Antezana's real age before he left for Everest, believing up to the time the expedition ended that he was not 69, but 62. "He took pride that his body never had had real problems," Fabiola remembered. "He said his body was like a virgin's, untouched."
Still, life was not perfect. One morning, a few years ago, his wife remembers, he asked to speak to her. With a little bow of his head, he murmured: "With you, I am very happy. But I seem to be missing something." He told her that he needed the mountains.
She would not, could not, stop him, she knew. During their 38-year marriage, each would always grant independence to the other. She had a construction and property development business that consumed her hours, and he now had his climbing.
Late last year, he came out of the shower one day and sat down on the brown marble of the bathroom's Jacuzzi, another accouterment in the wonderful life they'd built, which included a nearly finished vacation house in Annapolis and a large network of friends and admirers. They'd achieved everything Gladys could want, only now it wasn't enough for him, and she had come to know it.
He had a towel around himself. He crossed his hands, in a prayerful position, and said to her, "Gladys, I want to go to Everest."
She had heard of his Everest dream for years, and she knew that some climbers died there. She realized he was looking not only for a blessing, but also for a bit of reassurance. She pushed back his wet hair. "God bless you," she said, equal parts blessing and a prayer. "God bless you."
He assured her that he would be okay, that he would get good people to coordinate the expedition, as well as experienced climbers to accompany him. He was fit, he told her. He would be ready. He would be as strong as he had ever been.
According to his wife and daughter, Antezana prepared hard for Everest, going off to South America to climb more and reading medical journal articles about the dangers of being oxygen-famished at high altitude, highlighting critical passages with a pen. He reread Jon Krakauer's harrowing Everest book, Into Thin Air, which chronicled two disastrous Everest expeditions in 1996, when the mountain's overall statistics were horrific: 98 summits, 15 deaths. At the same time, Nils began calling his son in Portland, where 37-year-old David works as a neurosurgeon. Sometimes he was calling David twice a day, inquiring about medications that might ward off the worst effects of altitude sickness.
"I think he was concerned," David says. "I think it hit him near the end, what he was trying to do. I don't think he would have been calling me so often if he felt good about everything." David sent his father a prescription for a performance-enhancing drug called Epogen, but Nils didn't want it. "He didn't like drugs," David says. "He didn't like receiving any extra help that others wouldn't be getting."
Antezana looked forward to Everest -- and beyond. He had plans, he'd told friends. He wanted to learn to ride a Harley when he returned. He wanted to water-ski. He hoped to climb Kilimanjaro. He was already looking forward to the next conquest.
ANTEZANA AND GUSTAVO LISI WERE INTRODUCED IN ANTEZANA'S NATIVE BOLIVIA ABOUT TWO YEARS AGO, as the older man prepared to summit a South American peak. Within weeks, Lisi became his climbing partner. Those who observed the two together said they could only guess at Lisi's appeal to Antezana. The younger man, they said, was usually affable, and Antezana seemed to appreciate a Spanish-speaking guide. When Antezana decided to confront Everest, he asked Lisi over the phone late last year to accompany him. According to Antezana's wife and daughter, Antezana agreed to pay all of the younger man's expenses and an unspecified salary, with a bonus of $10,000 for successfully bringing him to the summit and back.
In early April, the two men flew together to Rome, where they met an Italian named Manuel Lugli, the head of an expedition company, Il Nodo Infinito (The Infinite Knot), hired by Antezana to provide his small group with virtually everything they would need to summit Everest during the next two months. Those provisions included food at a series of camps, drink, stoves, tents, bottled oxygen, scaling equipment such as ropes, spikes for boots and so-called ice axes, which look like poles and serve to balance climbers on unsteady and steep terrain. Lugli would also look to hire climbing aides from among Nepal's Sherpa community, a Tibetan people known for their endurance at high altitudes.
Most importantly, Lugli would arrange to buy a permit to climb the Nepalese side of Everest. Expeditions with fewer than seven people, like Antezana's, pair up with larger teams to acquire a permit from the Nepalese government, paying about $10,000 per climber for the privilege. Antezana and Lisi hooked on to an expedition led by a Mexican climber named Alejandro Ochoa, becoming part of a combined nine-man group. But, under Nepal's rules on Everest, it is not mandatory that members of any team climb with their official leader. Having secured their portion of the permit, Antezana and Lisi could climb alone.
Lugli hired two experienced Sherpas who had scaled Everest before and would provide whatever assistance Lisi and Antezana requested during their climb. But Lugli had nothing to do with the involvement of Lisi, who would claim later, in an e-mail to The Washington Post, that he had never gone to Everest as Antezana's guide, only as another climber. Indeed, no one on Everest is officially characterized by Nepalese authorities as a guide. But guides are hired routinely for Everest expeditions, and Lugli said that Lisi's role was clear. "Both Lisi and Nils talked about Lisi as the guide," Lugli says.
Lisi declined to speak directly to The Washington Post about Antezana, but he responded generally to questions, via e-mail, about the expedition on Mount Everest. Their Everest experience began in the Nepalese town of Lukla, where, at more than 9,000 feet, a climber's acclimatization to high altitude begins. It is generally a six-week process during which the climber treks and gradually climbs upwards while his body on its own produces more oxygen-carrying red blood cells to compensate for the diminished oxygen in the air. Virtually everybody en route to Everest treks the 40 miles or so from Lukla to the Base Camp at the foot of the mountain, usually a week-long journey during which the first symptoms of high-altitude complications often appear in climbers -- headaches, nausea, gastrointestinal problems and colds. Antezana experienced all those problems soon enough.
Traveling in Antezana's party during that first week, Lugli kept an eye on the elderly climber's progress and difficulties. According to Lugli, Antezana told him that midway through that opening week, while ascending toward a small village called Pheriche, at an altitude of about 14,500 feet, Lisi trekked so far ahead of him that Antezana lost sight of his guide and got confused when he arrived at a fork in the path. Antezana chose the wrong direction and walked for about an hour before he realized his mistake, then doubled back as the temperature was falling, feeling tired and sick, incensed that Lisi had not waited for him. Lisi would later deny through e-mail that there had ever been a serious problem between them during their climb.
Antezana went off the next day to seek treatment for a sore throat from American nurse Rhonda Martin, who was in Pheriche with a medical team researching high-altitude illnesses. Martin says she listened as Antezana fumed about Lisi, whom he described as rude and disrespectful. "He said that Lisi had called him 'stupid' for getting lost," Martin remembers. "Nils kept saying: 'He yelled at me. You don't treat anyone like that, especially a paying client.' " Martin recollects that Antezana talked about the possibility of firing Lisi. "Nils said, 'This is not working out.' "
After Lugli left Everest to return home, new problems arose quickly, according to Antezana's journal, retrieved with his possessions by Lisi and the Sherpas at the end of the expedition. Antezana's cold developed into an upper respiratory tract infection. He was stricken as well by worsening gastrointestinal problems, suffering from diarrhea, dehydration and a weakness that left him unable to move on some days. He lost 16 pounds from his 5-feet-10, 160-pound frame, before he had even begun the trek on Everest. He told his family in a phone call that if his illness persisted, he might come home.
But Antezana was a determined man, and after four days of rest, he began the process of acclimatization climbs. There are four camps above Base Camp, and the acclimatization treks are limited to the first three, with expeditions trekking up and down the mountain -- over frozen, dangerously unstable icefalls as tall as skyscrapers and along perilously steep faces where climbers latch themselves on fixed ropes nailed into the mountain and where a mistake can mean a fatal fall.
Antezana wrote in his journal that Lisi continued to leave him behind during their climbs. Antezana expressed his anger in the journal: "I almost fired him . . . He does not have a good sense of responsibility and confuses it with servitude."
On Friday, May 7, an accomplished Mexican climber named Hector Ponce de Leon says he saw the Antezana party descending from the 24,000-foot Camp Three toward Camp Two, a journey that eventually took the climbers onto a glacier pitted in places by crevasses undetectable beneath the snow. Ponce de Leon glanced at Antezana and worried. He looked for Lisi, who was, Ponce de Leon remembers, about 220 yards ahead, a speck in the distance. "I thought to myself, 'Gustavo left him . . . Unbelievable.' "
Antezana appeared unstable, unable to walk a straight line. "He was wasted, and they were only in the [acclimatization] climbs," remembers Ponce de Leon. "He was so wasted he couldn't even see the right way to the camp."
With his faculties impaired, even the simplest things were becoming hard for Antezana. Ponce de Leon guided him until they were off the glacier and onto the solid ground of a valley. Nearing their destination, confident that Antezana could see the camp ahead, Ponce de Leon left him and hurried to confront Lisi, already in Camp Two. Ponce de Leon remembered swearing at him. "What are you doing here?" he yelled at Lisi. "Your client is back there. Go back and get him."
Lisi went back and got him.
About the same time, Antezana spoke to his family, who had worried since his arrival at Base Camp and the stories of his gastrointestinal problems and weight loss. His daughter, Fabiola, became particularly concerned during one phone call when Antezana stopped speaking in Spanish, his customary language when having a private conversation with a family member. She blurted: "Why are you talking in English? What's wrong?"
"I don't want him to hear me." Fabiola says she understood: Him was Lisi.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"It isn't going so well," she recalls her father saying. She pressed him, and he repeated what he had written in his journal: Lisi was unreliable. "I don't trust him," he said, according to Fabiola, but just as she had been ready to plead for him to return home, he added: "But I can rely on the Sherpas . . . They are good."
SEVERAL PROMINENT CLIMBERS AND EXPEDITION LEADERS HAD CONCERNS ABOUT THE 33-YEAR-OLD LISI. That group included Basque climber Edurne Pasaban -- the only surviving woman to have summited both Everest and the famously dangerous K2 on the Pakistan-China border -- and Ponce De Leon, as well as the brothers Damian and Willie Benegas, Argentine Americans who led a successful American-based expedition company. Among the most damning claims was that Lisi had inflated his climbing credentials when he told Antezana and others that he had reached the summit of Everest in 2000. Although the registries of Everest summits included no mention of Lisi ever having scaled the peak that year, the claim of his purported summit had been posted for a long while on Lisi's Web site, according to Damian Benegas and the Antezana family. Government officials in Lisi's hometown of Salta, Argentina, formally recognized his purported Everest achievement in a 2000 proclamation.
Lisi would later adamantly deny that he ever claimed to have summited Everest that year. But other climbers recalled Lisi touting such a feat. After arriving in Nepal in early April of this year, Lisi casually mentioned his success again, according to the American nurse, Rhonda Martin, who remembered Lisi saying that he had scaled the mountain's Tibetan north face in 2000.
Lisi's purported claim infuriated no one in the world more than a Spanish climber named Juan Carlos Gonzalez. The two men had been climbing Everest together in 2000, when, as Gonzalez tells the story, a weary Lisi abruptly gave up on his quest to reach the summit, stopping for good at the third of four camps between Everest's Base Camp and the peak. Gonzalez went on to summit, only to run into difficulties on the way down the mountain. A storm blew in, and he was forced to spend an entire night high on Everest.
Noting Gonzalez's absence, two other climbers, far down the mountain, hurriedly ascended in a rescue attempt. According to Gonzalez, who would lose seven fingers to frostbite in the incident, Lisi not only declined to participate in the rescue but later stole film from Gonzalez's camera while the saved man rested. The film showed Gonzalez atop the summit, film that, Gonzalez alleges, Lisi used to claim on his Web site that he, not Gonzalez, was the goggled man who had reached the peak. The controversy received notice in the South American press. Lisi has steadfastly denied all wrongdoing, adding that he participated in the Gonzalez rescue. The charges continue to dog Lisi's career in the insular alpine communities of Latin American and Spain.
Word of mouth has limits in moutaineering, however. On another continent, as 2004 began, Nils Antezana had heard nothing that dented his confidence in Lisi.
continued at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9241-2004Nov24_3.html
What other achievement takes so much out of a person and accomplishes so little? I'll admit, I'm envious of people who can demand this much of themselves; a trek to base camp would have me begging for a bubble bath and a hot pizza. Still, when I read stories like this I can't help wondering what lasting things might have been accomplished by people with such incredible focus and strength of will.
Since 1996, the disastrous year documented by Jon Kraukauer in, "Into Thin Air," Mt. Everest seems to have become Hubris Central for desk-bound executives with lots of time and expendable income. The presence of unfit climbers poses a danger to everyone on the mountain. But for a price, almost anyone can find a guide willing to drag or carry him to the summit - and maybe abandon him there.
Like "Into Thin Air," this stranger-than-fiction account in the Washington Post features a climbing guide with no ethics; in this case, he is accused of having faked his credentials by posting another climbers's summit photos on his website - photos stolen from the climber's gear while others completed a rescue mission.
WTF?
It's not as if there was a record-setting climb in the balance, or even a shoe contract. What kind of person enjoys stolen glory?
His 69-year-old client became the second-oldest man and oldest American to summit Everest.
------------------
The Dark Side of the Mountain
When a doctor reached the peak of Everest, he celebrated with his guide and crew. So why was he left to die?
By Michael Leahy
Sunday, November 28, 2004; Page W12
Nils would realize how nervous she'd be, she thought. He'd call, he'd call soon.
Gladys Antezana lay in a Baltimore hospital bed, resting after minor surgery. Her husband was halfway around the world at that moment, and her questions about his safety and precise whereabouts had her on edge. At 69, Nils Antezana was attempting that day, May 18, to become the oldest American to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the highest point on the planet. It was a trek accompanied by considerable risks, Gladys knew. But Nils had climbed many mountains before, and, at the end of such expeditions, he had nearly always called Gladys as soon as possible, to tell her he was safe. Aware that she would be awaiting his call in the hospital, he had promised to be in touch quickly after his triumph. She expected his call to come at any minute. But it didn't.
Her anxiety grew. That day passed, and then the next, and still no phone call came from either her husband or his mountain guide, an Argentine named Gustavo Lisi.
Finally, she says, on May 20, at about 11:30 a.m., Washington time, her cell phone rang.
"It's Gustavo," said the voice.
She sensed immediately that there had been an accident. Before Gladys could speak, Gustavo Lisi plunged ahead. "Nils and I summited," she remembers Lisi saying.
"Where is my husband?" Gladys demanded.
He had a terrible accident, a catastrophe, Lisi said.
Gladys couldn't speak.
He stayed there on the mountain, she remembers Lisi saying. He couldn't come down, Gladys. But he was extremely happy, elated. It was so beautiful.
"Did you send someone up for a rescue?" Gladys says she finally managed to ask.
No, she recalls Lisi telling her. Nils couldn't have survived up there.
Why didn't you send someone up? she snapped.
Because I was sick myself, Lisi answered.
Lisi then shared, Gladys recalls, what he said were some of her husband's last words. "Nils said, 'I want to stay here. The mountain is my home.' "
For a moment, she could not think.
She recalls Lisi emphasizing that he had pleaded with Nils to continue moving. She recounts that he told her: "I said to him, 'Nils, you have a family. Let's go. Come on.' "
But Nils couldn't move or even respond, Lisi said. He added that Nils had been a wonderful friend, concluding, "He was happy at the end."
Before saying goodbye, the guide asked Gladys where he should send her husband's personal effects.
Lisi wouldn't need to send Nils Antezana's effects anywhere. He wouldn't need to do a thing because Antezana's daughter, Fabiola, would be flying to Katmandu, Nepal, within four days to get both the effects and a meeting with Lisi, during which she would demand an explanation for what had happened. What she had heard in telephone calls made to other climbers led her to believe that Lisi had made mistakes no guide should make, and therefore was responsible at least in part for her father's death. Fabiola knew she wouldn't be bringing her father back, but she wanted to leave Katmandu with the truth about how his dream went awry.
HIS FAMILY AND FRIENDS HAD ALWAYS CONSIDERED NILS ANTEZANA TO BE FULL OF SECRETS AND SURPRISES. He had a pilot's license and a plane, but his close friend Nick Ellyn never knew about either. For a long while, his flying buddies, with whom he co-owned the single-engine Cessna, knew little about Antezana's mountain climbing. Until after Antezana left for Everest, his wife had no idea that he had climbed a peak in Bolivia during a visit there a month earlier. "He was missing for four days, and I was asking people where he was," Gladys Antezana remembers. "[A relative], who heard it from somebody else, finally told me . . . I don't know why he didn't want me and others to know, but sometimes he was that way."
David Antezana, the couple's oldest child, saw the secrecy as a reflection of his father's desire for control over a few parts of his life. "He did a great deal for our family and other people," David says, "and I think he wanted something that belonged just to him. Many proud men are that way. They have things that are their own secrets."
For more than two decades, Nils Antezana had been the chief of pathology at Jefferson Memorial Hospital in Alexandria, but when the hospital closed in 1994, Antezana did not rush out to reacquire an executive title, contenting himself instead with doing pathology work for a variety of medical offices and offering consultations at a local hospital.
He was an immigrant who had received his medical training in Bolivia and then, although he spoke limited English, passed a U.S. exam to win his medical license in his new country in 1963. During his off hours, Antezana provided free treatment to patients in many of Washington's impoverished neighborhoods. Eventually, he brought his volunteer work into his home, where he set up an auxiliary office to treat the sore throats and flus of the poor, and examine economically squeezed cancer patients looking for a free second opinion, sometimes spending 30 hours a week treating the needy, apart from his normal job. He was indefatigable.
Then came the closure of Jefferson Hospital, and for the first time in his life, Antezana had time on his hands. While continuing his charity work, he learned to scuba dive. He windsurfed and did some hang gliding. He got in a harness once with a sky diving instructor and jumped out of a plane at 14,000 feet. But nothing absorbed him as much as his new passion for scaling mountains, a pursuit that began with modest treks in the United States but soon took him out of the country. He climbed mostly in South America -- renowned peaks that, while not nearly as high as Everest, were the tallest on the continent.
He threw himself into his workout and climbing regimens, confident that he could slow down his aging process as he moved through his sixties. He did not like talk of his age. His daughter did not even know Antezana's real age before he left for Everest, believing up to the time the expedition ended that he was not 69, but 62. "He took pride that his body never had had real problems," Fabiola remembered. "He said his body was like a virgin's, untouched."
Still, life was not perfect. One morning, a few years ago, his wife remembers, he asked to speak to her. With a little bow of his head, he murmured: "With you, I am very happy. But I seem to be missing something." He told her that he needed the mountains.
She would not, could not, stop him, she knew. During their 38-year marriage, each would always grant independence to the other. She had a construction and property development business that consumed her hours, and he now had his climbing.
Late last year, he came out of the shower one day and sat down on the brown marble of the bathroom's Jacuzzi, another accouterment in the wonderful life they'd built, which included a nearly finished vacation house in Annapolis and a large network of friends and admirers. They'd achieved everything Gladys could want, only now it wasn't enough for him, and she had come to know it.
He had a towel around himself. He crossed his hands, in a prayerful position, and said to her, "Gladys, I want to go to Everest."
She had heard of his Everest dream for years, and she knew that some climbers died there. She realized he was looking not only for a blessing, but also for a bit of reassurance. She pushed back his wet hair. "God bless you," she said, equal parts blessing and a prayer. "God bless you."
He assured her that he would be okay, that he would get good people to coordinate the expedition, as well as experienced climbers to accompany him. He was fit, he told her. He would be ready. He would be as strong as he had ever been.
According to his wife and daughter, Antezana prepared hard for Everest, going off to South America to climb more and reading medical journal articles about the dangers of being oxygen-famished at high altitude, highlighting critical passages with a pen. He reread Jon Krakauer's harrowing Everest book, Into Thin Air, which chronicled two disastrous Everest expeditions in 1996, when the mountain's overall statistics were horrific: 98 summits, 15 deaths. At the same time, Nils began calling his son in Portland, where 37-year-old David works as a neurosurgeon. Sometimes he was calling David twice a day, inquiring about medications that might ward off the worst effects of altitude sickness.
"I think he was concerned," David says. "I think it hit him near the end, what he was trying to do. I don't think he would have been calling me so often if he felt good about everything." David sent his father a prescription for a performance-enhancing drug called Epogen, but Nils didn't want it. "He didn't like drugs," David says. "He didn't like receiving any extra help that others wouldn't be getting."
Antezana looked forward to Everest -- and beyond. He had plans, he'd told friends. He wanted to learn to ride a Harley when he returned. He wanted to water-ski. He hoped to climb Kilimanjaro. He was already looking forward to the next conquest.
ANTEZANA AND GUSTAVO LISI WERE INTRODUCED IN ANTEZANA'S NATIVE BOLIVIA ABOUT TWO YEARS AGO, as the older man prepared to summit a South American peak. Within weeks, Lisi became his climbing partner. Those who observed the two together said they could only guess at Lisi's appeal to Antezana. The younger man, they said, was usually affable, and Antezana seemed to appreciate a Spanish-speaking guide. When Antezana decided to confront Everest, he asked Lisi over the phone late last year to accompany him. According to Antezana's wife and daughter, Antezana agreed to pay all of the younger man's expenses and an unspecified salary, with a bonus of $10,000 for successfully bringing him to the summit and back.
In early April, the two men flew together to Rome, where they met an Italian named Manuel Lugli, the head of an expedition company, Il Nodo Infinito (The Infinite Knot), hired by Antezana to provide his small group with virtually everything they would need to summit Everest during the next two months. Those provisions included food at a series of camps, drink, stoves, tents, bottled oxygen, scaling equipment such as ropes, spikes for boots and so-called ice axes, which look like poles and serve to balance climbers on unsteady and steep terrain. Lugli would also look to hire climbing aides from among Nepal's Sherpa community, a Tibetan people known for their endurance at high altitudes.
Most importantly, Lugli would arrange to buy a permit to climb the Nepalese side of Everest. Expeditions with fewer than seven people, like Antezana's, pair up with larger teams to acquire a permit from the Nepalese government, paying about $10,000 per climber for the privilege. Antezana and Lisi hooked on to an expedition led by a Mexican climber named Alejandro Ochoa, becoming part of a combined nine-man group. But, under Nepal's rules on Everest, it is not mandatory that members of any team climb with their official leader. Having secured their portion of the permit, Antezana and Lisi could climb alone.
Lugli hired two experienced Sherpas who had scaled Everest before and would provide whatever assistance Lisi and Antezana requested during their climb. But Lugli had nothing to do with the involvement of Lisi, who would claim later, in an e-mail to The Washington Post, that he had never gone to Everest as Antezana's guide, only as another climber. Indeed, no one on Everest is officially characterized by Nepalese authorities as a guide. But guides are hired routinely for Everest expeditions, and Lugli said that Lisi's role was clear. "Both Lisi and Nils talked about Lisi as the guide," Lugli says.
Lisi declined to speak directly to The Washington Post about Antezana, but he responded generally to questions, via e-mail, about the expedition on Mount Everest. Their Everest experience began in the Nepalese town of Lukla, where, at more than 9,000 feet, a climber's acclimatization to high altitude begins. It is generally a six-week process during which the climber treks and gradually climbs upwards while his body on its own produces more oxygen-carrying red blood cells to compensate for the diminished oxygen in the air. Virtually everybody en route to Everest treks the 40 miles or so from Lukla to the Base Camp at the foot of the mountain, usually a week-long journey during which the first symptoms of high-altitude complications often appear in climbers -- headaches, nausea, gastrointestinal problems and colds. Antezana experienced all those problems soon enough.
Traveling in Antezana's party during that first week, Lugli kept an eye on the elderly climber's progress and difficulties. According to Lugli, Antezana told him that midway through that opening week, while ascending toward a small village called Pheriche, at an altitude of about 14,500 feet, Lisi trekked so far ahead of him that Antezana lost sight of his guide and got confused when he arrived at a fork in the path. Antezana chose the wrong direction and walked for about an hour before he realized his mistake, then doubled back as the temperature was falling, feeling tired and sick, incensed that Lisi had not waited for him. Lisi would later deny through e-mail that there had ever been a serious problem between them during their climb.
Antezana went off the next day to seek treatment for a sore throat from American nurse Rhonda Martin, who was in Pheriche with a medical team researching high-altitude illnesses. Martin says she listened as Antezana fumed about Lisi, whom he described as rude and disrespectful. "He said that Lisi had called him 'stupid' for getting lost," Martin remembers. "Nils kept saying: 'He yelled at me. You don't treat anyone like that, especially a paying client.' " Martin recollects that Antezana talked about the possibility of firing Lisi. "Nils said, 'This is not working out.' "
After Lugli left Everest to return home, new problems arose quickly, according to Antezana's journal, retrieved with his possessions by Lisi and the Sherpas at the end of the expedition. Antezana's cold developed into an upper respiratory tract infection. He was stricken as well by worsening gastrointestinal problems, suffering from diarrhea, dehydration and a weakness that left him unable to move on some days. He lost 16 pounds from his 5-feet-10, 160-pound frame, before he had even begun the trek on Everest. He told his family in a phone call that if his illness persisted, he might come home.
But Antezana was a determined man, and after four days of rest, he began the process of acclimatization climbs. There are four camps above Base Camp, and the acclimatization treks are limited to the first three, with expeditions trekking up and down the mountain -- over frozen, dangerously unstable icefalls as tall as skyscrapers and along perilously steep faces where climbers latch themselves on fixed ropes nailed into the mountain and where a mistake can mean a fatal fall.
Antezana wrote in his journal that Lisi continued to leave him behind during their climbs. Antezana expressed his anger in the journal: "I almost fired him . . . He does not have a good sense of responsibility and confuses it with servitude."
On Friday, May 7, an accomplished Mexican climber named Hector Ponce de Leon says he saw the Antezana party descending from the 24,000-foot Camp Three toward Camp Two, a journey that eventually took the climbers onto a glacier pitted in places by crevasses undetectable beneath the snow. Ponce de Leon glanced at Antezana and worried. He looked for Lisi, who was, Ponce de Leon remembers, about 220 yards ahead, a speck in the distance. "I thought to myself, 'Gustavo left him . . . Unbelievable.' "
Antezana appeared unstable, unable to walk a straight line. "He was wasted, and they were only in the [acclimatization] climbs," remembers Ponce de Leon. "He was so wasted he couldn't even see the right way to the camp."
With his faculties impaired, even the simplest things were becoming hard for Antezana. Ponce de Leon guided him until they were off the glacier and onto the solid ground of a valley. Nearing their destination, confident that Antezana could see the camp ahead, Ponce de Leon left him and hurried to confront Lisi, already in Camp Two. Ponce de Leon remembered swearing at him. "What are you doing here?" he yelled at Lisi. "Your client is back there. Go back and get him."
Lisi went back and got him.
About the same time, Antezana spoke to his family, who had worried since his arrival at Base Camp and the stories of his gastrointestinal problems and weight loss. His daughter, Fabiola, became particularly concerned during one phone call when Antezana stopped speaking in Spanish, his customary language when having a private conversation with a family member. She blurted: "Why are you talking in English? What's wrong?"
"I don't want him to hear me." Fabiola says she understood: Him was Lisi.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"It isn't going so well," she recalls her father saying. She pressed him, and he repeated what he had written in his journal: Lisi was unreliable. "I don't trust him," he said, according to Fabiola, but just as she had been ready to plead for him to return home, he added: "But I can rely on the Sherpas . . . They are good."
SEVERAL PROMINENT CLIMBERS AND EXPEDITION LEADERS HAD CONCERNS ABOUT THE 33-YEAR-OLD LISI. That group included Basque climber Edurne Pasaban -- the only surviving woman to have summited both Everest and the famously dangerous K2 on the Pakistan-China border -- and Ponce De Leon, as well as the brothers Damian and Willie Benegas, Argentine Americans who led a successful American-based expedition company. Among the most damning claims was that Lisi had inflated his climbing credentials when he told Antezana and others that he had reached the summit of Everest in 2000. Although the registries of Everest summits included no mention of Lisi ever having scaled the peak that year, the claim of his purported summit had been posted for a long while on Lisi's Web site, according to Damian Benegas and the Antezana family. Government officials in Lisi's hometown of Salta, Argentina, formally recognized his purported Everest achievement in a 2000 proclamation.
Lisi would later adamantly deny that he ever claimed to have summited Everest that year. But other climbers recalled Lisi touting such a feat. After arriving in Nepal in early April of this year, Lisi casually mentioned his success again, according to the American nurse, Rhonda Martin, who remembered Lisi saying that he had scaled the mountain's Tibetan north face in 2000.
Lisi's purported claim infuriated no one in the world more than a Spanish climber named Juan Carlos Gonzalez. The two men had been climbing Everest together in 2000, when, as Gonzalez tells the story, a weary Lisi abruptly gave up on his quest to reach the summit, stopping for good at the third of four camps between Everest's Base Camp and the peak. Gonzalez went on to summit, only to run into difficulties on the way down the mountain. A storm blew in, and he was forced to spend an entire night high on Everest.
Noting Gonzalez's absence, two other climbers, far down the mountain, hurriedly ascended in a rescue attempt. According to Gonzalez, who would lose seven fingers to frostbite in the incident, Lisi not only declined to participate in the rescue but later stole film from Gonzalez's camera while the saved man rested. The film showed Gonzalez atop the summit, film that, Gonzalez alleges, Lisi used to claim on his Web site that he, not Gonzalez, was the goggled man who had reached the peak. The controversy received notice in the South American press. Lisi has steadfastly denied all wrongdoing, adding that he participated in the Gonzalez rescue. The charges continue to dog Lisi's career in the insular alpine communities of Latin American and Spain.
Word of mouth has limits in moutaineering, however. On another continent, as 2004 began, Nils Antezana had heard nothing that dented his confidence in Lisi.
continued at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9241-2004Nov24_3.html
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