No one has repeated Kharkiv resident Serhiy Bershov’s climb to Mt. Everest
CLIMBING ABC’S: CREMATORIUM RUINS
Mr. Bershov, I don’t seem to recall any mountains, not even big hills in Kharkiv oblast. Where did you get your urge to climb?
Bershov: It all started after grade 8. I got a job at a factory and eventually met with Volodymyr Poberezovsky, graduate of Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute and a climber. He organized a mountain climbing hobby group and we learned the ABCs in the ruins of an old crematorium, then we practiced in a stone quarry, and then in the Crimea. In 1965, I received a free resort accommodation in the Caucasus and there I made a climb winning the badge “Alpinist of the USSR.” Actually, mountain climbing was made a sport in the Soviet Union by Ivan Antonov and we call him the father of Russian mountain climbing. With me alpinism began with mountain climbing, which is an excellent kind of training, giving you speed, reliability, and teaching you to climb with economic movements. Not surprisingly, half the participants in our expedition are mountain climbers.
Is alpinism an expensive sport?
Bershov: It is. At one time I mastered the steeplejack wall painter’s trade, painting factory walls, smokestacks, radio and television relay, and water towers. Even then my heart was in the mountains... We have each to pay up to ten bucks for 24 hours in camp, and such field training sessions usually last between ten and twenty days. An expedition calls for heavy funding. During Soviet times such expenses could be borne only by the state. The state subsidized Olympic sports in the first place, and alpinism is not among them, regrettably. There was also the political aspect to consider. No one would allow a team representing a club or even a city to do such climbing, as it was the sole prerogative of the Soviet national team. I was lucky to become a member.
And this despite the death of your first wife, an alpinist?
Bershov: Alpinism means constant risk. Tamara died in 1974, in the Caucasus. Our son was four and a half years old. Now he is a married man and he works as a steeplejack.
AT THE PEAK OF THE EARTH
If you find someone in need of help in the mountains, can you just walk past and forget about it?
Bershov: In the mountains, if you get a distress signal, you leave everything and concentrate on a rescue operation. The horrible problem is that saving a person trapped at a high altitude is possible only if that person can move unaided after receiving help (medications, water, oxygen). You see, more often than not such help comes from alpinists that are also on the verge of exhaustion and can at any moment become victims themselves if they run out of strength. You know what it means spending the night high in the mountains, out in the cold? Without a tent or a sleeping bag, without a hot meal? At such altitude, in such circumstance, chances of survival are slim. There are only several cases of survival in the history of 8,000 meter climbs — people survived with bad frostbite. Altitude is a ruthless enemy, so I am against rash conclusions when analyzing the reasons for climbing accidents.
Are there special alpinist rations, a diet?
Bershov: Mostly we have herbal tea, compotes, meat with onions and rice, sometimes kysil [dessert made of fruit, berries, and potato starch, served with milk] as a special treat. We also take with us biscuits, cookies, fatback (although scientists say we shouldn’t take fatback, it’s not good at high attitudes). If you are an experienced climber, meaning you’re acclimatized, you can take red and black caviar, sausages, even dried salted fish. Sometimes we make a soup. The appetite is excellent up there.
Drinks?
Bershov: Seldom. High altitudes are very heavy on your organism and if you have one too many, the liver will respond immediately. Sometimes we take cognac, 400-500 g for four, so one can take a sip as a nightcap or at dinner, as a soporific. Sleeping high in the mountains is a problem.
APARTMENT FOR MT. EVEREST
You have climbed Mt. Everest several times.
Bershov: Right. For several centuries Mt. Everest (also known as Chomolungma) was considered insurmountable. Beginning in 1921, fifteen attempts were made to climb it and only the sixteenth expedition, armed with a mortar to shoot down avalanches, did it. In 1953, Edmund Percival Hillary (New Zealand) and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay (Nepal) made a successful ascent and returned. Before them, 160 people had died there, some from cold and exhaustion, others by falling down the abyss. For example, in the spring of 1966, Rob Hall, the noted New Zealand climber and mountain guide who had climbed the Everest four times, got stranded on the way down, at 8,500 meters altitude [with another climber who needed his help]. His mates down at the base camp kept in touch by mobile phone, urging him to keep climbing down, and so did his pregnant wife. Cheerfully, he bade her good night and promised to start getting down. He was found dead in a sleeping posture 12 days later.
By the way, back in 1982 you were the 120th climber to have summited the Everest.
Bershov: I was a member of the first Soviet expedition and we climbed the south wall, a route no one had tried before — and hasn’t to this day, from what I know. I was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor and a month later I moved into a three-room apartment in Kharkiv, as I had brought the city’s emblem to the top of the third pole of the planet.
Your ascent was at night. This would seem especially dangerous.
Bershov: Mykhailo Turkevych of Donetsk and I were the first to summit 8,848 meters at night. Dangerous? You know, I’m not a kamikaze. There isn’t a mountain peak worth losing even your small finger. I’m a normal man. Alpinists often start climbing at night to be able to walk on the snow while it’s still hard or to get through a dangerous spot. The moonlit landscape looks totally different, it’s harder to figure distances and get your bearings. Everything around you looks like a Spielberg setting, the mountain tops basking in silver light. In our case we had to start climbing at night. We had to get up there to help our mates who couldn’t get down themselves.
How does it feel standing at the peak of the globe?
Bershov: We alpinists are superstitious and we never discuss a summit before reaching it. The Everest peak is a snow crest about six or seven meters long and approximately one meter wide. I can’t say that we felt overjoyed. We were worried about getting down with our exhausted friends. We tried to take pictures, but our Ralley was frozen, then we dug for the Smena (an obsolete Soviet photo camera), but its leather case fell apart in our hands, though the camera was OK; it works in practically any conditions. We rested for a while than started to descend, picking stones here and there as souvenirs.
“WE BURIED THE ALPINIST AND CLIMBED ON...”
You had that urge to keep climbing, didn’t you?
Bershov: Oh, sure (laughing). My friends from Krasnodar invited me for the next climb. I joined the expedition as an instructor and consultant. We drove up to the base camp at 5,200 m. Acclimatization took several days. Then we harnessed and loaded the yaks (each carrying 60 kilos) and climbed to 6,400 m. There and at 7,700 and 8,300 we set up intermediate camps where we could rest. The last “storm camp” was where we started the ascent, dividing the team into three groups taking turns making their climb at a two-day interval, or so they could help one another in an emergency. Hard to believe but the whole team made it to the summit, a result never achieved by a national team. It was surprising the more so that the Krasnodar people did not have much by way of climbing experience and it was their first Everest ascent. The first group left an icon at the summit. I was with the second group and I mounted the National Flag of Ukraine. By the way, we met two Brits, a Pakistani, a Sherpa from Nepal, and two other foreigners there. We greeted each other and marveled at the beauty. When the foreigners learned that all 12 team members had made it to the peak they couldn’t find enough words to express their admiration. We were in a joking mood and told them that the only one that hadn’t made the ascent was the team cook, because he didn’t have the right kind of shoes.
Which physical problems are the hardest to endure in mountain climbing?
Bershov: Perhaps mountain sickness, lack of oxygen and fatigue. It affects people, making them nervous, aggressive, slow to think, and their coordination is poor. They quickly get tired and have to stop, you have to urge them on. A climber with these symptoms may forget all about personal safety and neglect to use protective equipment.
Did the party demand victory at all costs?
Bershov: I know of such cases, but they’d never assigned me such missions. Back in 1955, Leonid Brezhnev, then secretary of the central party committee of Kazakhstan, decided to mark the tenth anniversary of the Victory Peak [the highest peak — 7,439 m/24,406 ft — in the Tien Shan Mountains, in the border area where Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and China meet] by organizing an ascent, but the party functionaries placed in charge were incompetent, of course, so no practical preparations were made for the expedition. Yevgeny Kolokolnikov, expedition leader, tried to report the situation at the council of ministers of Kazakhstan, but was branded as an alarmist. Brezhnev summoned him to his office and did some pressuring, saying you’re are scared, aren’t you, you haven’t been to the front, have you. To which the man indignantly replied no, Comrade Brezhnev, I’m not scared, and yes, I’ve been to the front, fighting in World War II from beginning to end, I was with the 18th Army and you personally pinned a wartime decoration to my tunic. Brezhnev said I did, didn’t I, which means that if you could seize the Carpathian Mountains, you’ll surely climb to that peak. And so they tried to climb and lost eleven alpinists, practically the whole team. The team from Uzbekistan was assigned to get ahead of the rival, but they didn’t make it, either. What happened was a race, not a professional ascent, with climbers forgetting all about safety techniques. By the way, when they were delivering the only surviving Kazakh team member to the hospital, on a horse-driven cart, local resident would ask who the poor devil was, to which those accompanying the cart replied that a well-known spy had been caught and that he had resisted arrest.
They tried to conceal the tragedy?
Bershov: Yes. Several years later, a friend of mine found a diary of one the team, at 6,900 m. It was frozen in a block of ice. I found the body of yet another climber, Konstantin Rybalko by name. He lay on his back, his dark hair bleached by the scorching sun at that altitude. Beside the body was an open knapsack. A length of rope, wound four times round his thighs and secured by a knot, reached over the edge and down a 3,000 m drop. Apparently, the other climber Konstantin kept at other end of the rope, or three of them if climbing harnessed to the rope, went down the crevasse with part of the edge falling away. We buried the alpinist under a pile of rock and climbed on to the summit.
