Crazy? Lawyer, 53, Trying Everest Again

My first reaction when I heard the news was, "This guy is crazy. They're both crazy!"

The "news," as it happens, is that Jim Wickwire, the Seattle lawyer and mountain climber, was going to take on Mount Everest. After twice failing, he would try it again.

I have mixed feelings about mountain climbing as a means of filling in your spare time.

The New Yorker critic Brendan Gill once wrote: "I have no use for mountain climbers. I think of them as sexually immature weirdos, undergoing ordeals intrinsically of little greater merit than the ordeal of running barefoot over a bed of hot coals."

Yet I am a sucker for mountain climbers. Here in the Northwest we have a race of men who are, on balance, the best high-altitude climbers in the world: among others, the late Willi Unsoeld, the Whittaker twins, Phil Ershler, John Roskelley and the man in whose office I was sitting at the moment - Wickwire himself.

Jim is a compact, solidly built man. He is well-spoken to the point of poetry, as witness this sentence he once gave an interviewer, preserved on tape:

"Broad Peak," he said of a mountain neighboring K-2, "is simply geology, one more storm-tossed wave, higher than the rest of a land mass in upheaval.

"K-2 is architecture . . . and in the patterning of ridge couloir (steep gully), rock face and icefall, thrusting inexorably upwards toward the peak, there is the logic of a Bach fugue."

The temptation was to say to him, "You're really going to try it - again?"

But that would be a silly question to ask a man who has seen a series of fellow climbers killed on climbs with him. No need to ask a man who has established all the nordwand (northern) routes on Mount Rainier, been on six expeditions to McKinley, two expeditions to Everest, and who has established no fewer than 20 new routes in the Cascades.

Sitting across from his desk piled with legal documents, it would be easy to forget that Wickwire has very nearly killed himself a dozen times at high altitudes. He is missing parts of two toes, a portion of one lung; he suffered a torn-up shoulder. Heaven knows what other physical prices he will pay in later years.

Wickwire is 52 now, the father of five sons, ages 23 to 28.

"We'll leave Seattle on June 27," he said. "We'll make our try at the end of August."

This is a two-man attempt. No other Americans have made it as a pair. Wickwire's climbing partner will be John Roskelley of Spokane. The two friends have been on six expeditions together.

To charges that Wickwire is too daredevil, too death-defying, Roskelley has said: "I've been with Wick for months at a time and I've never seen him make a non-percentage move. I think he's very safe."

And Wickwire says of Roskelley, a writer and photographer: "He's the best Himalayan climber America has produced."

Roskelley, at 43, "is a little faster than me," Wickwire says. But it's all right if you get slower with age, "because you're not racing anybody."

The idea is endurance. The elements are skill and experience; safety lies in knowing when certain physiological warnings appear. Then it's time to turn back.

Wickwire and Roskelley will be gone two months - a shorter time than the three months it would take a larger expedition. The cost is much cheaper ($40,000-$45,000) because two men will need fewer animals, fewer interpreters.

Much of their supplies will come from equipment companies. "They'll give us a little money, too," said Wickwire.

"If you're in trouble, who will help? Isn't a larger expedition safer?" I asked.

"Ideally, if you're in trouble you get out of it on your own," he said. "With a bigger expedition, some less-experienced climbers can add to the danger."

There is the stress, the friction. Neither has made the summit. Wickwire has reached 27,000 feet each time, never the top.

"That is the whole point of this trip," he said. "We both want to COMPLETE the climb. In a sense, we have an investment in Everest."

Roskelley, Wickwire said, intends to make the climb without oxygen. "I would like to try it that way, too," Jim said.

But they will take oxygen along. There is a tradeoff to consider with oxygen: That is, it may help in getting warmth out to your extremities, but you are carrying an extra seven to 10 pounds.

All this climbing, years of it. So long gone from home. Isn't there a Mrs. Wickwire? What does she think of all this? Mary Lou Wickwire must have the soul of a stoic.

She once told an interviewer: "I could stop him from climbing, but I wouldn't want to live with him after that. I just couldn't do it to him."

After his second try on Everest in 1984, Wickwire told Mary Lou, "I'm not going back." But then he climbed McKinley last May and felt so good he wanted to challenge Everest once more.

The other night he told Mary Lou, "I broke my promise of 1984."

She said, "I didn't take it too seriously, because I know what you are."