The Other Side of Everest
By Matt Dickinson
Three Rivers Press, 2000, $13

The ill-fated May, 1996 Mt. Everest climbing season’s fourth anniversary has rolled around, with more books out on the subject: The premonsoon blizzard that led to the deaths of 10 or 11 climbers and a host of “I was there” books.

Not to mention fame and fortune for the best-sellingest of them all: “Into Thin Air,” by professional outdoor writer Jon Krakauer, who managed to tell a combined adventure story, and a socio-economic tale of how commercialized climbing Everest had become in the years since 1953, when only the elite few managed to make the world’s highest mountain summit.

Perhaps too many amateurs were trying the climb, led by money-and-fame-hungry competitive guides who would guarantee to take people up to the summit if they could afford the $60,000 per-trip price.

Krakauer caused the world to take a second look at mountaineering in the “death zone,” where life cannot be sustained without supplemental oxygen. In fact, “death zone” supplied the title of Dickinson’s book, published in 1997 in the United Kingdom.

While readers have become accustomed to lurid accounts, often the aesthetics of climbing and beautiful views – not to mention the spiritual thrill of being at the top of the world - begin to seem almost unimportant.

But freelance television documentary and adventure photographer Matt Dickinson has managed to combine a story about his own experience that season, living to tell his tale and still impressing the reader with the gigantic experience of climbing so high you can see the curvature of the earth in the distance.

“Everest does not jostle for position in the heart of the Himalayas, it presides over its lowlier cousins with effortless majesty,” Dickinson writes toward the end of this 233-page paperback version of the hardcover published in 1999. That says it for this reader – the fascination with all of these climbing efforts and what people go through.

Dickinson managed to return with all fingers and toes intact from the same 1996 hellhole event, when an unexpected storm (blizzard) swept the world’s tallest peak and essentially killed professional tour guides as well as their amateur customers as they tried to climb Mt. Everest’s popular southern face route.

Dickinson went up the north face, less popular route, where three East Indians and one Austrian climber died, though nothing to compete with the more numerous Americans and others who died, including a spectacular case of Lazarus risen from the dead in the form of Beck Weathers, a Texan left for dead by his teammates on the southern face. Weathers found his way back to camp and lived. Weathers, in fact, has published his account, “Left for Dead,” published in April this year.

Matt Dickinson’s story is forthrightly first-person, telling of his problems with cameras, lugging extra equipment and with personality conflicts on the expeditition that he was supposed to film in the context of an English actor’s finally making it to the summit in order to leave a prayer flag on the top in the interest of world peace. The actor, a very heavy and middle-aged one named Brian Blessed, didn’t make it because he was “done in” though not killed, by the ardors of the trip.

Instead, Dickinson and another climber who wielded another camera made it to the top where the prayer flag was duly left. And Dickinson had his story for television.

Never a really experienced climber, the English-born Dickinson was struggling to get out of his adventure-filming mode to spend more time with his growing young family at home. But the addiction of travel and danger fought with his wishes.

His point of view is one most of us would probably have, wondering, for example, why high-altitude climbers make such a big deal out of having to go to the bathroom in icy conditions. (He found out). And the importance of having reading matter along when one can’t leave the tent.

Being a photographer, Dickinson is very adept at describing the beautiful sunset, the unusual play of light and shadow on the mountains and describing other visuals.

The color photos in the book are mostly of people wearing climbing gear, with one or two eloquent shots of the mountains.

When they reach the summit of Everest, the wind that has been raging for days drops away, and Dickinson, who cries for the first time since a child, notices the “stupendous height.” Even though surrounded by other gigantice peaks, Everest does not compete with them once you are on its peak – it dominates them completely, he found.

Back on sea level again, Dickinson thaws out his frostbitten fingers, re-gains the 24 pounds he lost on the climb, and turns back into the same old adventure junkie again. He wasn’t invited to tea at Buckingham Palace, nor to some worthy scientific society to go over the finer points of this route, that route, or some mountain feature. But he is the same person he always was – still trying to get into screenwriting in Hollywood.

That’s life at sea level, he’s found: Full of tradeoffs and gray areas.