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Outside Magazine April 2002
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The Hard Way
Split Decisions (Cont.)

I TRIED TO GET INTO the high peaks four more times while in New Zealand, twice by helicopter and twice on foot. It was a no-hitter, a shutout. I drove back to Christchurch to fly home having never even seen Mount Cook.

En route to the airport I stopped in to see Guy Cotter, Rob Hall's old partner and now the owner and operator of Adventure Consultants, Hall's guiding business. I knew that Cotter and Hall had been close friends. They started climbing together as teenagers, became guides together. Cotter himself has led 15 expeditions to the Himalayas. We had corresponded but had never met, and I wasn't certain why I was going to see him. Sometimes we are guided by intuition we don't even know we have.

Mountains are worth climbing, which admittedly entails risk. But the truth is, mountains aren't worth dying for.
We hit it off immediately. We went out for breakfast, a great heap of eggs and bacon, and talked about kids and guilt and climbing and Asia. About loss and lessons. We talked straight into the afternoon. We left the café and went out to his house in the country, and sat for hours drinking tea in a living room filled with mementos from Nepal. I told him about my own shadows of Everest. And Guy told me how, in 1995, he guided a client, Doug Hansen, up to the south summit of Everest before making the decision to pull the plug. Hansen died with Hall the following year.

It was a painful subject, and we quickly moved on. But the conversation eventually circled back. It had to. Guy Cotter had spent his entire adulthood trying to determine when to push on and when to turn around. One of his best friends had died on the crux of the dilemma. His wisdom was hard-won.

"To be a successful mountaineer," Guy said, "you've got to be very conservative. But also very pushy. You've got to be able to be objective about what's happening. A mountain is always giving you signals and you have to have the knowledge to know what those signals are telling you. The mountain calls the shots. Not your sponsors or your clients or your emotions. I'm constantly thinking through the what-ifs. When all the conditions are favorable, that's when you push. If not, you must always, always, be prepared to walk away."

It took him almost a half-hour to itemize for me an expedition-honed checklist he uses to determine whether a summit push is safe or not. Snow conditions, weather, wind, temperature, team strength, team attitude—on and on.

Guy set down his cup of tea and stared out the window at the drizzle.

"Mountaineering is the one sport in which you don't learn from your mistakes," he said. "If we're lucky enough to live through the ambition of our youth, one day we realize that it takes more guts to turn back than to push on."

WE ARE ALL FED HEROIC slogans from an early age. A quitter never wins and a winner never quits. Never give up. Never cry uncle. Never say die.

But encouraging kids to excel in schoolrooms and on soccer fields, in careers and team sports, doesn't impose mortal stakes. Mountains do.

Let me be hypocritical and blasphemous and honest.

The truth is, mountains aren't worth dying for. Democracy, social justice, the environment—these are causes worthy of your life. A mountain is not. Your death on a climb does nothing for the world. It merely scars your family and friends forever.

Yes, mountains are worth climbing, which admittedly entails risk, but the important thing is to clearheadedly recognize when the tables have turned and it's time to do precisely what we have all been brainwashed to consider defeat: Turn back. Give up. Go down. Go home.

Sleep with your beloved, play with your kids or your nieces and nephews, take your parents out to dinner. Accept that quitting was exactly the right move. I did, finally.


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