She had heard of his Everest dream for years, and she knew that some climbers died there. She realized he was looking not only for a blessing, but also for a bit of reassurance. She pushed back his wet hair. "God bless you," she said, equal parts blessing and a prayer. "God bless you."
He assured her that he would be okay, that he would get good people to coordinate the expedition, as well as experienced climbers to accompany him. He was fit, he told her. He would be ready. He would be as strong as he had ever been.
Nils Antezana wears an oxygen mask during one of the last phases of his summit.
(Photograph Courtesy Antezana Family)
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According to his wife and daughter, Antezana prepared hard for Everest, going off to South America to climb more and reading medical journal articles about the dangers of being oxygen-famished at high altitude, highlighting critical passages with a pen. He reread Jon Krakauer's harrowing Everest book, Into Thin Air, which chronicled two disastrous Everest expeditions in 1996, when the mountain's overall statistics were horrific: 98 summits, 15 deaths. At the same time, Nils began calling his son in Portland, where 37-year-old David works as a neurosurgeon. Sometimes he was calling David twice a day, inquiring about medications that might ward off the worst effects of altitude sickness.
"I think he was concerned," David says. "I think it hit him near the end, what he was trying to do. I don't think he would have been calling me so often if he felt good about everything." David sent his father a prescription for a performance-enhancing drug called Epogen, but Nils didn't want it. "He didn't like drugs," David says. "He didn't like receiving any extra help that others wouldn't be getting."
Antezana looked forward to Everest -- and beyond. He had plans, he'd told friends. He wanted to learn to ride a Harley when he returned. He wanted to water-ski. He hoped to climb Kilimanjaro. He was already looking forward to the next conquest.
ANTEZANA AND GUSTAVO LISI WERE INTRODUCED IN ANTEZANA'S NATIVE BOLIVIA ABOUT TWO YEARS AGO, as the older man prepared to summit a South American peak. Within weeks, Lisi became his climbing partner. Those who observed the two together said they could only guess at Lisi's appeal to Antezana. The younger man, they said, was usually affable, and Antezana seemed to appreciate a Spanish-speaking guide. When Antezana decided to confront Everest, he asked Lisi over the phone late last year to accompany him. According to Antezana's wife and daughter, Antezana agreed to pay all of the younger man's expenses and an unspecified salary, with a bonus of $10,000 for successfully bringing him to the summit and back.
In early April, the two men flew together to Rome, where they met an Italian named Manuel Lugli, the head of an expedition company, Il Nodo Infinito (The Infinite Knot), hired by Antezana to provide his small group with virtually everything they would need to summit Everest during the next two months. Those provisions included food at a series of camps, drink, stoves, tents, bottled oxygen, scaling equipment such as ropes, spikes for boots and so-called ice axes, which look like poles and serve to balance climbers on unsteady and steep terrain. Lugli would also look to hire climbing aides from among Nepal's Sherpa community, a Tibetan people known for their endurance at high altitudes.
Most importantly, Lugli would arrange to buy a permit to climb the Nepalese side of Everest. Expeditions with fewer than seven people, like Antezana's, pair up with larger teams to acquire a permit from the Nepalese government, paying about $10,000 per climber for the privilege. Antezana and Lisi hooked on to an expedition led by a Mexican climber named Alejandro Ochoa, becoming part of a combined nine-man group. But, under Nepal's rules on Everest, it is not mandatory that members of any team climb with their official leader. Having secured their portion of the permit, Antezana and Lisi could climb alone.
Lugli hired two experienced Sherpas who had scaled Everest before and would provide whatever assistance Lisi and Antezana requested during their climb. But Lugli had nothing to do with the involvement of Lisi, who would claim later, in an e-mail to The Washington Post, that he had never gone to Everest as Antezana's guide, only as another climber. Indeed, no one on Everest is officially characterized by Nepalese authorities as a guide. But guides are hired routinely for Everest expeditions, and Lugli said that Lisi's role was clear. "Both Lisi and Nils talked about Lisi as the guide," Lugli says.
Lisi declined to speak directly to The Washington Post about Antezana, but he responded generally to questions, via e-mail, about the expedition on Mount Everest. Their Everest experience began in the Nepalese town of Lukla, where, at more than 9,000 feet, a climber's acclimatization to high altitude begins. It is generally a six-week process during which the climber treks and gradually climbs upwards while his body on its own produces more oxygen-carrying red blood cells to compensate for the diminished oxygen in the air. Virtually everybody en route to Everest treks the 40 miles or so from Lukla to the Base Camp at the foot of the mountain, usually a week-long journey during which the first symptoms of high-altitude complications often appear in climbers -- headaches, nausea, gastrointestinal problems and colds. Antezana experienced all those problems soon enough.
Traveling in Antezana's party during that first week, Lugli kept an eye on the elderly climber's progress and difficulties. According to Lugli, Antezana told him that midway through that opening week, while ascending toward a small village called Pheriche, at an altitude of about 14,500 feet, Lisi trekked so far ahead of him that Antezana lost sight of his guide and got confused when he arrived at a fork in the path. Antezana chose the wrong direction and walked for about an hour before he realized his mistake, then doubled back as the temperature was falling, feeling tired and sick, incensed that Lisi had not waited for him. Lisi would later deny through e-mail that there had ever been a serious problem between them during their climb.
Antezana went off the next day to seek treatment for a sore throat from American nurse Rhonda Martin, who was in Pheriche with a medical team researching high-altitude illnesses. Martin says she listened as Antezana fumed about Lisi, whom he described as rude and disrespectful. "He said that Lisi had called him 'stupid' for getting lost," Martin remembers. "Nils kept saying: 'He yelled at me. You don't treat anyone like that, especially a paying client.' " Martin recollects that Antezana talked about the possibility of firing Lisi. "Nils said, 'This is not working out.' "
After Lugli left Everest to return home, new problems arose quickly, according to Antezana's journal, retrieved with his possessions by Lisi and the Sherpas at the end of the expedition. Antezana's cold developed into an upper respiratory tract infection. He was stricken as well by worsening gastrointestinal problems, suffering from diarrhea, dehydration and a weakness that left him unable to move on some days. He lost 16 pounds from his 5-feet-10, 160-pound frame, before he had even begun the trek on Everest. He told his family in a phone call that if his illness persisted, he might come home.
But Antezana was a determined man, and after four days of rest, he began the process of acclimatization climbs. There are four camps above Base Camp, and the acclimatization treks are limited to the first three, with expeditions trekking up and down the mountain -- over frozen, dangerously unstable icefalls as tall as skyscrapers and along perilously steep faces where climbers latch themselves on fixed ropes nailed into the mountain and where a mistake can mean a fatal fall.
Antezana wrote in his journal that Lisi continued to leave him behind during their climbs. Antezana expressed his anger in the journal: "I almost fired him . . . He does not have a good sense of responsibility and confuses it with servitude."
On Friday, May 7, an accomplished Mexican climber named Hector Ponce de Leon says he saw the Antezana party descending from the 24,000-foot Camp Three toward Camp Two, a journey that eventually took the climbers onto a glacier pitted in places by crevasses undetectable beneath the snow. Ponce de Leon glanced at Antezana and worried. He looked for Lisi, who was, Ponce de Leon remembers, about 220 yards ahead, a speck in the distance. "I thought to myself, 'Gustavo left him . . . Unbelievable.' "
Antezana appeared unstable, unable to walk a straight line. "He was wasted, and they were only in the [acclimatization] climbs," remembers Ponce de Leon. "He was so wasted he couldn't even see the right way to the camp."
With his faculties impaired, even the simplest things were becoming hard for Antezana. Ponce de Leon guided him until they were off the glacier and onto the solid ground of a valley. Nearing their destination, confident that Antezana could see the camp ahead, Ponce de Leon left him and hurried to confront Lisi, already in Camp Two. Ponce de Leon remembered swearing at him. "What are you doing here?" he yelled at Lisi. "Your client is back there. Go back and get him."
Lisi went back and got him.
About the same time, Antezana spoke to his family, who had worried since his arrival at Base Camp and the stories of his gastrointestinal problems and weight loss. His daughter, Fabiola, became particularly concerned during one phone call when Antezana stopped speaking in Spanish, his customary language when having a private conversation with a family member. She blurted: "Why are you talking in English? What's wrong?"
"I don't want him to hear me." Fabiola says she understood: Him was Lisi.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"It isn't going so well," she recalls her father saying. She pressed him, and he repeated what he had written in his journal: Lisi was unreliable. "I don't trust him," he said, according to Fabiola, but just as she had been ready to plead for him to return home, he added: "But I can rely on the Sherpas . . . They are good."
SEVERAL PROMINENT CLIMBERS AND EXPEDITION LEADERS HAD CONCERNS ABOUT THE 33-YEAR-OLD LISI. That group included Basque climber Edurne Pasaban -- the only surviving woman to have summited both Everest and the famously dangerous K2 on the Pakistan-China border -- and Ponce De Leon, as well as the brothers Damian and Willie Benegas, Argentine Americans who led a successful American-based expedition company. Among the most damning claims was that Lisi had inflated his climbing credentials when he told Antezana and others that he had reached the summit of Everest in 2000. Although the registries of Everest summits included no mention of Lisi ever having scaled the peak that year, the claim of his purported summit had been posted for a long while on Lisi's Web site, according to Damian Benegas and the Antezana family. Government officials in Lisi's hometown of Salta, Argentina, formally recognized his purported Everest achievement in a 2000 proclamation.
Lisi would later adamantly deny that he ever claimed to have summited Everest that year. But other climbers recalled Lisi touting such a feat. After arriving in Nepal in early April of this year, Lisi casually mentioned his success again, according to the American nurse, Rhonda Martin, who remembered Lisi saying that he had scaled the mountain's Tibetan north face in 2000.
Lisi's purported claim infuriated no one in the world more than a Spanish climber named Juan Carlos Gonzalez. The two men had been climbing Everest together in 2000, when, as Gonzalez tells the story, a weary Lisi abruptly gave up on his quest to reach the summit, stopping for good at the third of four camps between Everest's Base Camp and the peak. Gonzalez went on to summit, only to run into difficulties on the way down the mountain. A storm blew in, and he was forced to spend an entire night high on Everest.
Noting Gonzalez's absence, two other climbers, far down the mountain, hurriedly ascended in a rescue attempt. According to Gonzalez, who would lose seven fingers to frostbite in the incident, Lisi not only declined to participate in the rescue but later stole film from Gonzalez's camera while the saved man rested. The film showed Gonzalez atop the summit, film that, Gonzalez alleges, Lisi used to claim on his Web site that he, not Gonzalez, was the goggled man who had reached the peak. The controversy received notice in the South American press. Lisi has steadfastly denied all wrongdoing, adding that he participated in the Gonzalez rescue. The charges continue to dog Lisi's career in the insular alpine communities of Latin American and Spain.
Word of mouth has limits in moutaineering, however. On another continent, as 2004 began, Nils Antezana had heard nothing that dented his confidence in Lisi.
