The Higher They Climb
By BRUCE BARCOTT
Published: March 2, 2008

MOUNTAIN MADNESS
Scott Fischer, Mount Everest and a Life Lived on High.
By Robert Birkby.

In 2003, on the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Mount Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary, who died in January, returned to the mountain. He looked around at base camp's satellite dishes, electric generators and free-flowing booze, and despaired. "Just sitting around in a big base camp, knocking back cans of beer, I don't particularly regard as mountaineering," he said.

How did we get from Hillary's noble ascent to a Himalayan version of Burning Man? Two new books lend some insight. One is a biography of a man who helped open the era of guided climbing on Everest; the other offers a portrait of the mountain as a magnet for selfishness and bad behavior.

Scott Fischer is best known as the charismatic American guide who died on Everest in 1996, a disaster told in Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air." To his friend Robert Birkby, for Fischer to be remembered for that tragedy alone is an unjust summation of an extraordinary life. "Mountain Madness" is a personal, uncritical biography that rounds out the portrait of Fischer sketched in Krakauer's best seller.

An athletic kid from New Jersey, Fischer was known as a bold risk taker — they called him "the fallingest man in climbing" — until an old-school cragger taught him the Zen of controlled ascent. From then on, Fischer spoke of mountains as a stage on which to practice a mastery of motion. Physical mastery wasn't uncommon among Fischer's peers; what set him apart was his personal magnetism and infectious enthusiasm. The man was a walking Red Bull-and-vodka cocktail. "You're either cruisin' or you're bummin,'" he often said. "Cruising's a lot more fun, so you might as well cruise."

Fischer created his adventure travel company, Mountain Madness, as a way to make a living while "cruising." He climbed some of the world's toughest mountains, sometimes with clients and sometimes without, but the big prize — Everest — eluded him until his third try in 1994. Fischer and a handful of others stood at the center of the mountain's transformation from an elite mountaineering arena into an amateur's deadly challenge. In 1989, some of today's best-known Everest climbers were still struggling to post their first summit. Only two years later they were guiding clients up the South Col. In late 1995, a little over a year after his own first summit, Fischer was telling prospective clients, "We've got the Big E wired."

Fischer didn't have it wired, of course, and the following spring Everest took his life. His death seemed to put an exclamation mark on the closing of an era. In 1996 Fischer and his guiding colleagues invited the world to follow them via satellite phone and Internet updates — and the floodgates opened. "The privacy of an expedition," Birkby writes of that infamous climbing season, "so long one of its basic aspects, was about to disappear."

Privacy was the least of the losses. In the years after Fischer's death, camaraderie and common decency all but disappeared too. According to Michael Kodas, the author of "High Crimes," base camp today is a lawless village, complete with thievery, extortion, prostitution and occasional violence. In 1996, 98 climbers made it to the top. In 2007, more than 500 summited. "Along with that rush of visitors," Kodas writes, "has come a new breed of parasitic and predatory adventurer." It's gotten so bad that some expeditions hire Sherpas to stand guard against burglars.

Kodas, a reporter for The Hartford Courant, knows the situation firsthand, having tried to climb Everest in 2004 and 2006. (He was turned back by bad weather and poor health.) "High Crimes" looks at the mountain through the eyes of a fascinated and appalled climber. Kodas weaves accounts of his own hilariously awful adventures with the not-so-funny story of Nils Antezana, a 69-year-old American doctor who fell victim to the underhanded practices now common on the mountain. (Both attempted Everest in 2004 but never met. Kodas climbed the mountain's north side, from Tibet; Antezana took the southern route, from Nepal.)

Bruce Barcott is the author of "The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw," published last month.

Publishers Weekly
February 11, 2008
Mountain Madness: Scott Fischer, Mount Everest and a Life Lived on High
Robert Birkby. Citadel, $24.95 (368p) ISBN 9780806528755

Mountaineer Scott Fischer and outdoors expert Birkby (author of trail maintenance standard Lightly on the Land) were friends and trekking companions from their 1982 meeting until Fischer's tragic, controversial death on a 1996 expedition up Everest, leading a tour group from his Mountain Madness adventure travel business (from which his clients all descended safely). Combining his memories with those of Fischer's family, friends, fellow mountaineers and other alumni of the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, Wyo., where Fischer worked, Birkby chronicles Fischer from his New Jersey childhood through his years teaching with NOLS, his drive to perfect his skills and reach the highest peaks, and the struggles to establish his travel company. The obsession indicated by the title is what Birkby most wrestles with, attempting to understand the passion that drove Fischer higher and higher; especially in his climbing scenes, Birkby succeeds in illuminating the power mountains can exert over the human soul. He's also adept at capturing powerful ties of love and friendship, of which Fischer had plenty; his charisma, charm and open embrace of adventure suffuse the narrative. This warm remembrance should strike a powerful chord not just in climbers, but in anyone who has lost a dear friend to untimely death. 16 pages of color photos. (Feb.)

Rock & Ice
July 2008
Mountain Madness: Scott Fischer, Mount Everest & A Life Lived On High
Robert Birkby

Considering all that's been written about Scott Fischer, it's a shame that nearly all of it centers on May 10, 1996. The fact that it took this long for his full story to appear testifies to the effort and research invested by the author, Scott's friend Robert Birkby.

Many may already know that Fischer climbed Everest, K2, Lhotse and Broad Peak. But few know he shared a rope with noted climbers like Ed Viesturs, Stacy Allison and Charley Mace, or that he survived several unbelievable falls including an unroped launch off Bridal Veil Falls in which he stabbed his axe through his ankle. Mountain Madness succeeds in taking Scott Fischer's linear story and tying it into the infancy of adventure travel and Himalayan guiding.

Birkby laughingly and lovingly recounts Scott's boldest adventures, some undertaken with caution-to-the-wind youthfulness and others with veteran patience and strength. The author also acknowledges many of Scott's shortcomings, such as improper planning or pressing companions too hard. Long before Everest '96, a client died in Scott's arms, though Birkby does not link that episode and Scott's future high-altitude guiding decisions. Thankfully, Birkby avoids over-analyzing the thoroughly documented Everest denouement.

All in all, Mountain Madness brings well-deserved attention to a life lived more fully and in higher places than most. Even better, it reminds us how passionate Scott really was.
~ Jon Jonckers