Word: climbers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...large part, to impress their neighbors with their sophistication. Evolution itself is a process of rising above one's origins and one's station." The writer Sébastien Chamfort located what is surely the ultimate snob, a nameless French gentleman: "A fanatical social climber, observing that all round the Palace of Versailles it stank of urine, told his tenants and servants to come and make water round his château...
...called the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club, has moved on to more mature concerns. He is in fact a member of an American mountaineering expedition in Tibet that intends to make an ascent without oxygen of Everest's forbidding and unclimbed East Face. George Leigh Mallory, the great British climber who died on Everest while making a summit attempt in 1924, had written of the East Face that "other men, less wise, might attempt this way if they would, but, emphatically, it was not for us." Tabin, tracked down with his colleagues in China last week, said, "The most difficult...
Reinhold Messner, 38, the solo climber of Everest, has paid a price for his fame as the world's strongest expedition climber. He talks with the rocklike confidence of all the mountain world's hard men, saying, for instance, that Everest by the traditional Hillary-Tenzing route is "a good holiday, but not really challenging." Messner has never used oxygen in his life, he says with a trace of pride. But he offers freely the opinion that his memory has been dulled by long periods of oxygen deprivation. There have been other prices. His brother Gunther died...
...daredevil. Even the most extreme risk taker talks like an astronaut of safety gear, of weather carefully calculated, of redundant strengths to cushion failure. What really protects them, however, seems to be their abnormal awareness of how very much alive they are. "You know about accidents," says a rock-climber. "But it's always the guy next to you, never you." How could it be you? But this inspired state does not often last a lifetime...
John Bachar, 26, is a Yosemite climber who has pushed strength and skill to a level that astonishes even other good rock apes. Equipped with nothing but boots and gymnast's chalk, and unbelayed by safety ropes, Bachar flows up pitches graded 5.8 or better. Gym workouts have given him steely arm and finger strength, but superb technique and unshakable concentration are his most powerful adhesives. He may work out a sequence of ten or so moves to take him up an overhang hundreds of feet in the air, then discover that the route cannot be forced any farther...