Climbers feared dead on China mountain
SEATTLE – One story, of a sudden and savage storm on the world’s tallest peak, is told in Jon Krakauer’s best-selling “Into Thin Air.” Details of the new story are still being played out in China, but it appears to end the same way: with the death of a well-loved owner of Seattle adventure company Mountain Madness.
Directors and staff at the company held out hope Wednesday that a body found on a remote peak in southwestern China was not that of Mountain Madness owner Christine Boskoff or her climbing partner, Charlie Fowler of Norwood, Colo. But as searchers prepared to return to the site where a gray boot was spotted sticking out of the snow, it seemed likely that the two had been smothered by an avalanche.
Arlene Burns, a friend of the missing climbers who was helping to coordinate the search, said the body was found at the 17,390-foot level on Genie Mountain, also known as Genyen Peak, not far from the Sichuan border with Tibet. The mountain is 20,354 feet tall.
“We’re all tense,” Mountain Madness President Mark Gunlogson said Wednesday, pausing frequently as his lips trembled. “We’ve been involved in this rescue for over two weeks. We’ve kept our emotions on the back burner. There’s going to be a moment when we can let the emotional side of things surface.”
Boskoff bought Mountain Madness in 1997, shortly after the death of its founder, Scott Fischer. Fischer was one of the guides leading climbers on Mount Everest in May 1996 when a fierce storm hit, killing him and seven others – a tale Krakauer survived to tell in his best-seller.
Gunlogson started with the company as a guide in 1993, and remembers how quickly news of Fischer’s death came, in a phone call from a base camp on Everest.
This time, the search has been a drawn-out hunt for clues to where Fowler and Boskoff might have gone: Staff at Mountain Madness and in Colorado, where the U.S. search coordinators are based, sifted through old e-mails and worked with Chinese officials, who interviewed rural villagers in hopes of tracing their travels.
But a clue to their whereabouts emerged several days ago when searchers found a driver who dropped the pair off near the mountain Nov. 11. They told him they would climb the mountain and then meet him Nov. 24 to pick up their luggage, but didn’t show up, the driver reported.
Mountain Madness also contacted former Gov. Gary Locke and Gov. Chris Gregoire, who asked government officials in China to support search efforts, Gunlogson said.
Boskoff twice reached the peak of Everest and had summitted the tallest peaks on five other continents, but she preferred to explore the unnamed, unclimbed mountains of southwestern China, Mountain Madness director David Jones said.
She was also drawn to the culture of that region: The last people to see Boskoff and Fowler alive may have been the monks at Genyen Monastery, where they stopped Nov. 12. The pair told the monks they would return in four days, but never did, according to searchers.
“It is the freedom, it is the challenge, both physical and mental, and the ability to go into places that no human has ever been. She’s more interested in going to the edge of the map,” Jones said. “The fact that she was in beautiful, pristine mountains, unclimbed areas, and climbing with someone she knew, trusted and loved – I think she would be happy with this as a way to go.”