The most treacherous mountain on earth, deep in the hinterlands of India’s Garhwal Himalayas, soars 21,850 feet off the deck.
Mount Meru carves the sky with a massive, stone replica of a great white shark’s fin. Just like the smaller marine version, it’s a major warning signal.
Who’s got the right stuff? There’s a specific group of hard men who take this particular brand of hardship as joy. Joy! Who are these men and what motivates them?
One immediately thinks: cage-fighters, footballers, pilots, spec-ops military, and extreme sportsmen—men with stereotypically huge sternocleidomastoid neck muscles and ax-chopped cleft chins, right?
But make no mistake—in the vernacular of the current Mytho-poetic men’s movement, this chill group of dudes who converse in climber-speak (a variant of surfer-speak), are outrageously warrior-quadrant dominant.
The outstanding climbing documentary “Meru,” winner of the 2015 Sundance audience award, (narrated by master alpinist Jon Krakauer), is a gut-check demonstration of this extreme grit, and it opens the door to a rare insight into what makes such men tick.
Hard Men and the Right Stuff
In Tom Wolfe’s acclaimed book “The Right Stuff,” about astronauts, Navy carrier pilots, and Airforce test pilots, there was a desert bar where the screen door slammed, the whiskey flowed, and the test pilots who flew screaming jets past the sound barrier before it was “safe”—told high-danger aviator tales.Yosemite Valley’s Camp 4, home to the world’s rock-climbing elite, was also such a place in the 1960s and ‘70s. It was a last outpost of America’s Wild West hard-man ethos—where big wall climbers told tales of desperate deeds up on high-crag routes with names like Lost Arrow Chimney, Pacific Ocean Wall, Mescalito, and Snake Dike.
There’s a tradition involved with groups of men who live on the cutting-edge of any endeavor, where legendary figures grow into myths, and the elders look with quiet satisfaction and excitement to the jaw-droppingly talented “young Turks,” the next up-and-coming heroes. Such talent hints to us of our ability to transcend the earthly.
The Shark’s Fin Looms
Conrad Anker, legend-in-his-own-time mountaineer, is father to a family of four towheaded kids. Actually, they’re the kids of his former climbing partner, Alex Lowe, who fell to the Reaper in an avalanche in October 1999 on Tibet’s Mount Shisha Pangma.“Meru” filmmaker and longtime climbing partner of Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, says: “The more nonchalantly Conrad asks me about something (climbing the Shark’s Fin), the more I should be worried. Meru had a reputation of being impossible.”
They went looking for a third on the rope. Speaking of “young Turks,” they'd heard of Renan Ozturk.
Cue electrifying footage of Ozturk’s desert free soloing (climbing without a rope) hundreds of feet up, quarter-inch ledges to step on, thin holds and cracks to grip—absolutely horrifying to civilians. Who better to have on your rope than someone who doesn’t need one?
As Jon Krakauer relates in one of his many talking-head interviews featured in the film, the Shark’s Fin is a test of master climbers. It’s considered the anti-Everest: There are no Sherpas to haul gear; you haul it all yourself.
Jimmy
Jimmy Chin, in an interview with The Epoch Times, with classic rock-climber self-deprecation concerning his abilities, said that he’s a “utility man” when it comes to climbing. Actors Will Ferrell, Chevy Chase, and Phil Hartman on “Saturday Night Live” were “utility men” with a wide spectrum of abilities (as opposed to specialists) who could make just about any scene work. Chin professes to be the climbing version.
It Begins
Says Conrad Anker: “5:30 in the evening, time to start—this is the best part. I know I’ve said that at various stages. But this really is it—night-time ops.”
Up on the stunning, gargantuan, snow-fluted walls. “Why do we do this stuff? For the view,” jokes Conrad. The climbers further joke about their “ghetto bivouac” (sub-satisfactory sleeping arrangement), and about how it could be worse. “You know it’s grim when your sleeping bag lies directly on the snow.”
Like “bivouac” and “ops,” other combat terms are used in climbing. Belaying in a steady stream of falling rock and ice is referred to as “taking shrapnel.” It might not be war, per se, but it’s just as deadly.
Every now and then the camera backs off, and we’re hit with absolutely magnificent views of the mountain and surrounding ranges. The only word that comes to mind trivializes it—beautiful.
After seven days, they’ve eaten half the food. There are some comical food conversations regarding four-days-in-a-row of couscous-eating; the rationed, daily, one spoonful of granola, and roasting gnarly cheese rinds with a blowtorch. “Next week,” Jimmy jokes, “we'll be eating our boots.”
Elder-Warrior Mentoring
Narrator Krakauer jumps back in to explain the role of the mentor in climbing. The now mythic Mugs Stump was Anker’s mentor. It’s the traditional Eastern martial arts teacher–student relationship. Young men need teaching, testing, challenging, and forging. And they especially need an older male’s 100-percent trust in their abilities.Now, Anker is mentor to young Ozturk, who, albeit talented enough to free solo at heights that make the average mind freeze up, has no experience with climbing in minus 20-degree weather, and harbors, in his mind, a place of wanting to quit. But he also doesn’t want to let the team down. This is archetypal of all dangerous missions where men in teams develop the selflessness and willingness to die for each other.
Not This Time
The trick is to keep the risk manageable. Seventeen days in, 100 yards short of the summit, they have to turn around. There’s relief and heartbreak. There’s no summit bid because it would mean an unsustainable, extra night sleeping on the cliff face. They'll take no such stupid risk.They all take time off; Chin goes to Chad and Borneo on filming jobs. Ozturk goes extreme skiing with pro snowboarder Jeremy Jones and busts his head wide open, coming within a miraculous millimeter of being a vegetable, and losing half the blood supply to his brain.
Round Two
Ozturk didn’t tell his girlfriend he was going back to Meru. And, busted skull and all—they’re back at it. Extreme adventure! The porta-ledge breaks! The team jury-rigs part of an ice ax and an ice screw using some athletic tape—back in business!This second attempt is outrageous. The personal and group challenges they overcame must be witnessed. American climbers Anker, Chin, and Ozturk summit on Meru Central (20,702 feet) on Oct. 2, 2011, via the Shark’s Fin, in 12 days. That’s no spoiler. It’s a teaser, trust me.
Ultimately, Why They Do It
Post-climb, we see photos of frostbite and trench foot: feet so cold and so wet for so long they’ve begun rotting. This is the mega-pain. This is the addiction? We want to know why.It’s said of some ultra-runners, who run 100 miles in one shot, that they have a fierce purity. The same is said of special operations military communities. These men who live with constant, daily pain burn off the trivialities of human existence. They have completely sweat out the small stuff.
John Long, a climber of Anker’s generation and a brilliant author of climbing literature, explains the severe addiction of extreme alpinism as going to a place where you know you’re already dead. And in the forbearing of that state, where you give up all hope and still beat all the odds, lies “a fearsome addiction.”
The sign above the entrance to Hades in Dante’s Inferno reads “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” One must go through hell to get to heaven. The classic Buddhist double-lotus position is said to burn off—by forbearing pain—one’s karma. Same with the hair shirts and self-flagellation of the medieval ascetics.
So men and women who live with pain in this fashion may be on a sporting version of a path to spiritual enlightenment. Rudolf Steiner, renowned Western mystic, scientist, philosopher, and founder of Waldorf schools and biodynamic agriculture, predicted sports would be the Western world’s segue to spirituality. See “Meru” and decide for yourself.
Oh, and by the way—Chin filmed this whole thing himself (with assistance from Ozturk), while climbing the Shark’s Fin. And like they say—behind every great man, there’s a great woman. In Chin’s case, that would be his wife and partner-in-crime, the beautiful, Princeton-educated filmmaker Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi.