When Tom Hornbein takes the podium at the Rocky Mountain Literary Festival on Oct. 17, he’ll be standing on familiar ground.
As a professor and chairman of the department of anesthesiology at the University of Washington in Seattle, the energetic 84-year-old has addressed many a capacity audience. As a dedicated researcher in the field of high-altitude physiology and performance he’s delivered many a scholarly paper to many a scholarly panel. And as a celebrated mountaineer and author of “Everest: The West Ridge” he’s recounted one of the most remarkable stories in the history of human endeavor more times than he’d care to count.
And yet, looking ahead to his engagement at Mount Vernon Country Club next month, Hornbein has no idea what he’s going to say. And that’s just the way he likes it.
“I don’t really prepare anything,” explains Hornbein, sitting comfortably in the sun room of his Estes Park home. Moss-rock covers the interior walls. A spotting scope standing within easy reach is trained on the summit of Longs Peak. Outside, an enormous herd of imported Wyoming goats is busily shaving the front yard. “I like a little bit of uncertainty.”
Uncertainty – the lure of it, the pursuit of it, the conquest of it – has been a bedrock principle guiding Hornbein’s life since long before he ever recognized that fact. And the consequences and lessons of a lifetime of deliberate uncertainty have certainly given Hornbein plenty to talk about.
If asked, he might talk about growing up in Saint Louis, and about how he used to spend every summer at Camp Cheley in Devil’s Gulch outside of Estes Park, first as a camper and later as a counselor, glorying in the majesty and mystery of the high Rocky Mountains. He loved mountaineering literature, inhaling early Himalayan classics such as “High Conquest” and “Kingdom of Adventure – Everest” like a man gulping oxygen at 28,000 feet.
“They were just fantasies to a kid like me,” Hornbein smiles. “I never really thought I’d ever go to that part of the world.”
Hornbein studied geology at the University of Colorado in Boulder for a time, worked as a naturalist in Rocky Mountain National Park, and volunteered with mountain rescue teams. And when the sedate observation of rocks began to seem too rigid a discipline compared with the perpetual unknowns presented by the never-ending duel between Man and Nature, he changed course toward medicine and found himself working in a Navy hospital in San Diego.
In 1962 the Cold War was at its frostiest. No American, nor any Soviet, had yet planted a flag atop the “Goddess Mother of the World” and there was considerable interest in powerful quarters that the Stars and Stripes got there before the Hammer and Sickle. A prominent mountaineer named Norman Dyhrenfurth was putting together an expedition to do exactly that, and he invited an old climbing companion to come along. Given the opportunity to make his childhood fantasies real, Hornbein didn’t take too much persuading.
“I wanted to do something that I didn’t know whether it could be done,” says Hornbein. “I guess I needed that uncertainty.”
In fact, uncertainty played an essential role in Hornbein’s now-legendary1963 assault on Everest. In order to secure sufficient funding for the expedition – and to give it a politically benign gloss of respectability – certain researches were to be conducted on the mountain, including studies into what Hornbein’s friend and fellow mountaineer, sociologist Dick Emerson, called the “Uncertainty Principle.”
“His thesis was that motivation is maximized when the outcome is uncertain,” Hornbein explains. “When we climbed Everest there was definitely enough uncertainty.”
In Hornbein’s case, as it turned out, there was nothing but. While the expedition’s major press was to be against Everest’s well-charted South Col, a handful of climbers including Hornbein lobbied hard for a second front along the mountain’s untried and insanely perilous West Ridge. Most members of the expedition gave Hornbein’s proposal exactly no chance for success. Hornbein and his companions deemed it barely possible, and that was enough.
Spoiler Alert – On May 22, 1963, Hornbein and three companions endured appalling dangers and unimaginable hardships to become the first mountaineers to reach Mount Everest’s summit by the West Ridge. A particularly difficult feature of their route now bears the name “Hornbein Couloir” And by descending Everest via the South Col, the party also became the first to accomplish a traverse of the Earth’s highest peak.
In the long years since 1963 some 60 expeditions have dared the West Ridge. A scant six have succeeded, placing 14 climbers on top of the world at a cost of 16 lives. In his book “Into Thin Air” author and mountaineer Jon Krakauer writes that Hornbein’s ascent “was, and continues to be, deservedly hailed as one of the great feats in the annals of mountaineering.”
Back home, Hornbein and his comrades were feted as conquering heroes and invited to breathe the rarified atmospheres of elite salons from the Explorers Club to the White House. For his part, Hornbein did his best to avoid the spotlight.
“When we were climbing I didn’t know or care how it would be viewed by the world. Afterward, I just wanted to get back to my life.”
Still, he considered certain aspects of the experience worthy of record. The expedition’s restrained and responsive leadership, for example, the mature and respectful temperaments of its hand-picked rank and file, and its uniquely democratic organization – he wrote about all of that and more in “Everest: The West Ridge.”
“I thought about calling it ‘Everest: The World’s Highest Metaphor’” he says, only half joking. “It would have given me open season to say whatever I wanted.”
What Hornbein ended up saying in The West Ridge has ever since been acclaimed as among the finest works of mountaineering literature ever penned. Rich in imagery, high in drama, immensely readable, The West Ridge he put a human face on that most extreme of sports, focusing on the character of the men who endured those hardships together and the relationships they forged along the way.
“To me, what was so unique about the expedition was the diversity of talents and the interaction of the people involved. I wanted to convey that the reality and the humanity of climbing a mountain is not really so different from how you succeed at anything else in your life, from your marriage, to your profession, to raising your kids.”
Hornbein conveyed that thought with powerful clarity, and then he went back to his life. While he never lost his passion for the mountains, the great reach of Hornbein’s life after the West Ridge has been grounded in medicine. And, having once been made aware of it, he’s come to see the powerful force of uncertainty at work everywhere around him.
“I found out I love research – the uncertainty of the hypothesis, and trying to prove the outcome. In science, different views increase uncertainty, and uncertainty leads to more thoughtful problem-solving.”
Even his decision in 2006 to leave Seattle for his boyhood haunts seems to validate Emerson’s theory.
“It’s the Uncertainty Principle again,” Hornbein smiles. “After I retired I needed to find new challenges.”
When the author of “Everest: The West Ridge” takes the podium at the Rocky Mountain Literary Festival on Oct. 17, it’s dead-certain he’ll say something worth hearing. Just don’t bother asking him what it will be.
“It’s better if there’s a little uncertainty.”
