IF YOU ARE AT ALL concerned about bumping into death around a blind corner, this has been a bad season to be outdoors. Every Monday evening seemed to find some bundled hairdo reporting live from search headquarters, a makeshift encampment of Blazers and Pathfinders from which a dozen volunteers fanned out into the snowy woods to find the hikers or snowmobilers who didn't return home Sunday night. The local live stand-up was inevitably followed by a snip of videotape from farther afield, some godforsaken spot in Montana or Alaska where—you think we've got it bad—another avalanche had swept four or seven innocents to their untimely demise. Even the most housebound spud has by now picked up the rudiments of the avalanche search: Gather 20 volunteers, stretch them out like advancing Redcoats, and set them jigging those 20-foot poles.
Debbie Hanley
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It's not that this winter has been an unusually bad avalanche season. We did get dumped on—Mount Baker and Mount Rainier threatened their all-time snow records—but the number of victims claimed by sliding snow—four—was only one more than in an average year. It seems like there's more death in the outdoors now because when it happens, it's shoved in our faces. KBN—Killed By Nature—has become one of America's most popular cultural motifs. It began with the best-selling books Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm; now, local TV news shows, national magazines like Dateline NBC, tabloids like Extra!, snuff-video showcases like Real TV, local and national newspapers, magazines, Web sites, and book publishers are ravenous for blow-by-blow accounts of disaster in the woods. We're still feeling the impact of the 1996 deaths on Mount Everest; next month's three-year anniversary will see the publication of at least three I Was There Too books. When Joe DiMaggio died last month the editors of People opted not to put him on the cover, an unusual move for a magazine whose all-time best-selling issues are celebrity-obit numbers. Instead, the editors went with the story of three women who vanished from Yosemite. The Krakauer-ish cover line: "Without a Trace."
If our contemporary supply of Donner Party survivors dries up, we're not above digging through the archives to find more. Last autumn's resurrected hero was Ernest Shackleton, whose crew of Antarctic explorers endured months of icebound captivity on the frozen Weddell Sea in 1915-16. This spring will witness the return of George Mallory, pioneering Everest victim and coiner of the mountaineering clich頢Because it is there." Mallory, the original Everest obsessive, was on his third expedition to the mountain in 1924 when he and his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine, set out from their 28,125-foot camp and walked into oblivion. A team of climbers led by veteran Rainier guide Eric Simonson is currently ensconced at Everest base camp, preparing to make a run up high to find the still-missing remains of the English explorers.
The day before he left, I asked Simonson why he was going after Mallory. "My goal is to tell a great story," he e-mailed in reply. "This is a classic story of people going into the unknown with the absolute minimum of equipment—tweed jackets, leather boots, canvas tents. They were climbing at 28,000 feet without oxygen, with the most primitive systems. Most people have only heard about Mt. Everest in the context of the 1996 tragedy. They don't realize that there's 75 years of great history associated with that mountain. That's what this climb is about. It's not just a search for some nasty corpse!" Daily reports on the search's progress will be broadcast from base camp on the Mountain Zone Web site (www.mountainzone.com). If the expedition finds Mallory's body, look for it on the front page of The New York Times.
Call it an uneasy fascination; death in the outdoors continues to intrigue me. I find myself carrying months-old newspaper clippings in my wallet: a story about a guy who died when a tree branch fell on his head, another about a snowmobiler buried in an avalanche. Freezing to death, suffocating under snow: They strike me as almost ancient ways of death, as unexpected and archaic as a public stoning. We live in an age in which humans constantly imperil wilderness. We put miles of forest to the blade, plug rivers with concrete, drive wolves, salmon, bears, and lynx out of existence. The helplessness of nature in the face of industrialized civilization has become so routine that the idea that wilderness might pose a danger to humans appears as a quaint contrarian notion.
Among the following seven deaths, some lend themselves to obvious lessons: Don't forget the 10 Essentials,* don't high-mark a 40-degree slope, don't snowboard an avalanche chute. But most do not. They happen in unexpected and sometimes unexplainable ways that challenge our most commonly held notions about nature and our place in it.
CRUELLY
Patrick Nestler, 29, killed June 11, 1998, while climbing Mount Rainier. Nestler, a client with Rainier Mountaineering Inc., was caught in an avalanche that swept two teams of RMI climbers off the nose of Disappointment Cleaver. Still clipped into the climbing rope, Nestler dangled from a rock cliff directly in a snowmelt waterfall for more than three hours. He died of hypothermia not long after rescuers reached him.
