Hoping for the Best

It's a nasty week in the mountain world, as two dramas are playing out with all-too-possible lethal results. On Mt. Hood, searchers are still struggling through violent storms to search for three climbers who did not return from a summit attempt last weekend. The weather on Hood is apocalyptic this week, but hopes are kept alive for at least one of the climbers, who phoned from a snow cave near the summit on Sunday and who apparently has been switching his phone on and off since then. Meanwhile, Christine Boskoff and Charlie Fowler are overdue from a two-month expedtion to central China. The two climbers, among the most experienced mountaineers in the U.S., were due to fly to Denver on December 4. There's information on how to contribute to the search effort here, and Alpinist has done a good report on the search.

I remain perhaps irrationally optimistic in both cases. The climbers on Hood were experienced and, despite media reports to the contrary, reasonably prepared for the route; the fact that at least one of them was dug into a snow cave is a good sign. And Fowler has been doing walkabouts in China and Tibet for more than a decade—he rarely applies for permission or tells people exactly where he's going. He knows these little-explored mountains perhaps better than any Westerner, and has expressed his deep empathy for them and for the Tibetan people in evocative photographs like these Polaroid transfers from Kham, the area where he and Boskoff were traveling this fall, reproduced from Fowler's web site. Charlie is also a survivor of the first order, including walking (or crawling) away from a 400-foot fall off Longs Peak and a 1,000-foot fall in Asia. And so I am hopeful that he and Boskoff either saw something good and just decided to extend their trip and go for it, or that they ran into some trouble but soon will be walking back into a village in China, hungry and exhausted, with yet another amazing tale to tell.