‘Burgess Book Of Lies’ Great Reading - Honest!

As the reporter approached holding a notebook and pen, Adrian Burgess, a notorious British mountain climber, appeared noticeably uneasy.

Burgess had just finished presenting a slide show at Mountain Gear in Spokane.

“And who are you?” he asked with a quizzical stare.

“I’m with the newspaper.”

“Thank God you’re the press - and not the police.”

Indeed, Burgess has spent plenty of time looking over his shoulder. If he hasn’t caused trouble in the past few months, his identical twin, Alan, probably has.

“I only crossed paths with the Burgess brothers a couple of times in the Himalaya,” said Spokane climber Chris Kopczynski. “But the reputation that preceded them was always about two wild and crazy guys with big bulges.”

Kopczynski pointed out that “most of the Brits have a don’t-give-a-dam attitude.” But the Burgess brothers take the term “crazy climbers” to new heights.

The brothers have written a new book, “The Burgess Book of Lies,” to sort some reality out of the myths surrounding their penchant for fights, drinking, womanizing and destruction.

“We wrote the book because so many wild stories have grown to include us even though we weren’t part of them in the first place,” Adrian said almost convincingly. “The stories include subjects such as mountains, jails and even sheep.”

Burgess admits that all the stories in which the brothers play a part are not for the written record. “You read what’s in the book and then you think, ‘Holy —! If these are the stories they say are appropriate to print, think what the unprintable ones must be like.”

Burgess said there’s a chance the book, which is a little about climbing and a lot about people, is being considered for a movie.

The only sure thing is that it wouldn’t be rated G.

Of course, climbing the world’s highest peaks is serious business, and Adrian Burgess knows it. He’s climbed many of the big ones, and he’s still alive. That says something in itself.

In 1986, the year of his first attempt at K2, the world’s second highest peak, 13 climbers died on the mountain, including one of his close friends.

“It’s called the savage mountain because of the weather,” he said. “People don’t use oxygen because there are no Sherpas to carry the bottles. That’s why so many more people climb Everest.”

The possibility of dying keeps him on his toes, but death itself isn’t a deterrent.

Referring to the eight climbers who died on Mount Everest this spring during the mountain’s deadliest single storm, Burgess said, “The tragedy doesn’t make me pause because they were idiots who died.”

Burgess’s slide show illustrated his three failed attempts to climb K2. It was a tame account by Burgess standards. Highlights included:

Surviving an ordeal after his expedition bus was hijacked by armed religious rebels who apparently killed dozens of people in a remote village.

Convincing his climbing partner to continue upward in a brutal K2 storm by telling him to pretend he was climbing in Scotland.

“If you don’t climb in bad weather, you don’t climb in Scotland,” he said.

Relishing the chance to take photographs of women in certain Himalayan regions “because you’re really not supposed to.”

At 48, Burgess has been climbing for 34 years. “When I first went to the Karakoram, there had been more men on the moon than on top of K2,” he said. “I’ve been to K2 three times. I still haven’t climbed it. I’m in no rush to go back because there are so many other mountains.” Hoping to capture some insight from Adrian’s many travels and experiences, climbers huddled around him after the slide show.

Responding to one question, Burgess, never one to be politically correct, said he couldn’t single out what would be the world’s best mountain or beer “any more than I could tell you who’s the best lady.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo