Mount Everest Mission -- Brent Bishop Follows In His Father's Footsteps, But Walks A Different Course

For most men, following in father's footsteps means a bit of schooling, a lot of hard work and a long apprenticeship in the family business.

For Brent Bishop, it's a bit more complicated.

His father is Dr. Barry Bishop, one of America's preemininent explorers. And the paternal footprints lead all the way to the top of Mount Everest.

The elder Bishop was a member of the 1963 expedition that made Seattle's Jim Whittaker the first American atop Everest. This spring, Brent Bishop, 25, will retrace that group's South Col route. After paying a visit to the top of the world, Bishop and four partners hope to erase environmental scars left behind by earlier climbers, such as his father.

Barry Bishop's massive expedition - with 27 tons of gear lugged by 900 porters - went to Everest for adventure, science, and later, glory. His son's five-man, low-impact expedition is dropping the glory and picking up garbage.

In keeping with a '90s push for conscientious climbing, the Sagarmatha (the Nepalese name for Mount Everest) Environmental Expedition has pledged to remove a ton of trash from abandoned camps high on the mountain. Previous expeditions have cleaned up Everest's bustling base-camp area, but many discarded tents, oxygen bottles and other climber waste remain at high-altitude camps, where walking is strenuous and garbage removal is unheard of.

Even if the group meets its garbage-removal goal, they won't solve Everest's environmental woes. A ton of trash is but a dent in the overall 10 tons of refuse believed to be on the mountain. The goal is to start making a difference.

"We're not really going to `clean up' Mount Everest," Bishop said. "The point is to set an example. We want to set a precedent that a small team can go in, summit, then leave the mountain in better shape than we found it."

If other climbers don't follow that lead, "the 2,000 pounds of garbage we take out will be back in a few years," Bishop said.

The refuse will be passed down the mountain by climbers and Sherpa assistants, then sorted and shipped out by U.S. enviro-trekkers organized by Scott Fischer, a Seattle climbing guide and Sagarmatha summit-team member.

The environmental commitment illustrates a major generational difference between Brent Bishop and climbers of his father's era. For years after Sir Edmund Hillary's first ascent of the 29,028-foot peak in 1953, Everest was The Prize for the world's climbers, and expeditions sacrificed everything - including their lives and tons of equipment - to attain it. Expeditions were big, slow and equipment-intensive. Most climbers relied on bottled oxygen.

Today, climbers substitute advanced, lightweight gear, a handful of skilled colleagues and refined climbing know-how for the mass force of climbing's past. Many Himalayan climbers forego oxygen bottles, a practice unthinkable as recently as the late 1960s.

To Brent Bishop, no-oxygen climbing is second nature. He has guided extensively in the Grand Tetons for Jackson Hole Mountain guides and has conquered major peaks throughout the U.S., Canada and South America. The recent University of Washington graduate - he has an M.B.A. and a degree in environmental management - learned of the planned environmental climb last year at 14,000 feet on Alaska's Mount McKinley, where he first crossed paths with Fischer. It seemed a natural fit.

Brent Bishop believes the summit is in his blood.

"I always knew I'd be on Everest at some point," he said. "It seems like the normal step - although it's come a bit sooner than I expected."

The expedition leaves Seattle March 12. Barry Bishop, vice president of the National Geographic Society, has given the project his blessing. Not that he had a choice.

"What can I say to a son who wants to go off and climb Mount Everest, when I've already done it?" he asks.

Brent Bishop was born in 1966, three years after his father returned with Whittaker's expedition. His father took him climbing as a youngster, and initial results were disastrous.

"I was terrified," Brent Bishop said. "There were lots of tears."

Later, his fears eased and his interest soared. "I recall in high school, he started playing hooky and going up with instructors," his father recalled. "Then all of a sudden, he's off guiding in the Tetons."

Now, Barry Bishop says, "His expertise in technical climbing is far beyond mine."

That's not always easy for Brent Bishop to believe.

"The more I climb, the more I respect my father's ability," he says.

He recalled climbing Denali's West Buttress - on a route his father had pioneered.

"Literally, I'm following in my dad's footsteps," he said. "You see this image of your dad now, he's sort of fat, smokes cigarettes. But I'm following one of his climbing routes, and it's killing me. It's given me a whole new respect for what he has done."

What the elder Bishop did was make a miraculous 1963 Everest summit push that put himself and partner Lute Jerstad on the summit three weeks after Whittaker and Sherpa Nawang Gombu led the way. On the descent, Bishop and Jerstad met up with fellow climbers Dr. Thomas Hornbein and the late Willi Unsoeld, who had had just summited Everest via its previously unclimbed West Ridge. The exhausted foursome bivouacked overnight at 28,000 feet with no tents, sleeping bags or oxygen. The ordeal cost Bishop and Hornbein their toes.

Whittaker, who had summited three weeks earlier, became the hero. The other three were merely footnotes. But the order of finish - and for some, reaching the summit itself - was overshadowed by the bond the climbers formed on the mountain, Barry Bishop said.

"Despite the usual stresses of an expedition, we came back even better friends than when we left. For most of us, that was more important than the summit."

That often doesn't seem to be the case these days, when anyone with $60,000 can buy onto a commercial expedition to the mountain. In recent years, Everest's summit has been conquered by more than 30 climbers in a single day.

"People are buying an experience," Barry Bishop laments. "They get to the summit, and I guess it makes good cocktail conversation. But I'm not sure about their motives."

In the Bishop family, motives are more clear. Thirty years ago, Barry Bishop went to prove it could be done. Next month, his son is going to prove it can be done better.

If he succeeds, he just might become what his father has been to an entire generation of climbers: An example.