Wild Dreams and Steps to Reality

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The team will take the basic route first attempted by the Englishman George Leigh-Mallory in the 1920s—up to a saddle called the North Col and then up the northeast ridge to the summit. When last seen, Mallory and a young Oxford student were inching their way upward about 1,500 feet below the summit. Then darkness and bad weather dosed in. No remains were ever found, except for an ice ax in the snow. Their ghosts, along with the many others lost on this peak, still haunt those who would "conquer" it.

Hey, why an encore? Since Hillary climbed Everest, people have been all over that mountain, even taking live TV cameras up to the top. In fact, to some minds, all those climbers have by now virtually domesticated the peak—in the process strewing and leaving trash everywhere. It's gotten so bad that Hillary himself, in a fit of dismay, recommended that Everest be closed for five years or until someone figures out how to get all the old oxygen bottles and other detritus off its face.

Whittaker quietly disagrees: "To me, the mountains are like church, and people should go to church. You don't close the mountains."

So what's this climb all about? A guy over 60 proving something? No, not this time. Part of the egalitarian rule for this expedition is that those slated to take the last steps to the summit cannot have been there before. In deference to this rule—his own idea—Whittaker will not be among those standing on the highest point of Earth.

The idea is bigger than that.

Wearing their Everest Expedition T-shirts, a pair of Chinese climbers begins a trek up to Rainier's base camp to further test their skills.

A scholar of symbols has said that "of all metaphors, only those pertaining to height, ascent, depth, and descent are axiomatic. Nothing can explain them, but they explain everything." In almost every society we know of, heroic ascents, be they winged or terrestrial, have always bespoken raising oneself up to greater heights of morality, strength, or creativity.

So according to the plan, on April 22, which is also Earth Day, three climbers—a Chinese, a Russian, and an American—will rope themselves together and take the final steps up the last 600 feet of Everest. If one of them falters, either he or she will be hauled up by the other two, or all three will turn around and another three will set forth, until one of the five teams of three has made it.

Even at Rainier, climbers put the new cleanup ethic into practice. On the way down, sleds are loaded with debris-packed bags.

The rope joining the team is as symbolic as the climb itself. The idea is so simple that when it was first proposed in some back room in Seattle where mountaineers get together to swap stories and dreams, everybody laughed. One guy fell off his chair laughing. There were thousands of Russian and Chinese troops glowering at each other across their mutual border, and perestroika hadn't yet made its way into American dictionaries.

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