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Overview
At the beginning of his memoir Life Lived Wild, Adventures at the Edge of the Map, Rick Ridgeway tells us that if you add up all his many expeditions, he’s spent over five years of his life sleeping in tents: “And most of that in small tents pitched in the world’s most remote regions.” It’s not a boast so much as an explanation. Whether at elevation or raising a family back at sea level, those years taught him, he writes, “to distinguish matters of consequence from matters of inconsequence.” He leaves it to his readers, though, to do the final sort of which is which.
Some of his travels made, and remain, news: the first American ascent of K2; the first direct coast-to-coast traverse of Borneo; the first crossing on foot of a 300-mile corner of Tibet so remote no outsider had ever seen it. Big as these trips were, Rick keeps an eye out for the quiet surprises, like the butterflies he encounters at 23,000 feet on K2 or the furtive silhouettes of wild-eared pheasants in Tibet.
What really comes through best in Life Lived Wild, though, are his fellow travelers. There’s Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, and Doug Tompkins, best known for cofounding The North Face but better remembered for his conservation throughout South America. Some companions don’t make the return journey. Rick treats them all with candor and straightforward tenderness. And through their commitments to protecting the wild places they shared, he discovers his own.
A master storyteller, this long-awaited memoir is the book end to Ridgeway’s impressive list of publications, including Seven Summits (Grand Central Publishing, 1988), The Shadow of Kilmanjaro (Holt, 1999), and The Big Open (National Geographic, 2005).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781938340994 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Patagonia |
| Publication date: | 10/26/2021 |
| Pages: | 424 |
| Sales rank: | 219,579 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Ridgeway is recognized as one of the world’s foremost mountaineers. He was part of the 1978 team that were the first Americans to summit K2, the world's second-highest mountain, and he has climbed new routes and explored little-known regions on six continents.
Ridgeway is also an environmentalist, writer, photographer, filmmaker and businessman. For fifteen years beginning in 2005 he oversaw environmental affairs at the outdoor clothing company Patagonia. Before joining Patagonia, he was owner/president of Adventure Photo & Film, a leading stock photo and film agency. He has authored six books and dozens of magazine articles and produced or directed many documentary films. He was honored by National Geographic with their Lifetime Achievement in Adventure Award, and was awarded the Lowell Thomas Award by the Explorers’ Club. Ridgeway serves on the boards of Tompkins Conservation and the Turtle Conservancy. He lives in Ojai, California.
Read an Excerpt
The Two Burials of Jonathan Wright
The Konka Gompa monastery was perched on a small bench on an otherwise steep hillside overlooking the terminus of the glacier that descended the west side of Minya Konka. I knew that on a clear day there was a stunning view of the 24,800-foot peak that rose without peer above the eastern margin of the Tibet Plateau, but that afternoon the mountain was shrouded in monsoon clouds. In the last dim light of a dim day I stood beside Asia Wright, both of us leaning on the rail encircling the second floor of the gompa, looking at the prayer flags that hung like bunting under the eaves. At the altar in the center of the courtyard, a smoldering bough of juniper released a single tendril of smoke into the still air. From the prayer room, we heard the chant of the senior monk who was old enough to have lived in the original monastery, before it was destroyed by the Mao’s Red Guards in the 1970’s.
The Kampas, the ethnic Buddhists in eastern Tibet, had done an admirable job rebuilding the monastery, but even then I could see it didn’t match the original. Twenty years before, we had camped next to the ruins of the old monastery. Back then, in 1980, it had been only four years since the end of the Cultural Revolution, and the Chinese had just opened their door to foreign mountaineers. We were the first Westerners in the area in 50 years.
Now nearly two decades later I was in the same place with Jonathan’s daughter, who had just turned 20, and who was with me not on a journey but a pilgrimage. That night I lay in bed propped against a headboard, writing in my journal by the light of a candle secured in a pool of wax atop my bedpost. My bed was along one end of the room, Asia’s in the middle, and the old monk’s, who was sharing his room, on the opposite end; he was chanting sotto-voce as he arranged his belongings on his nightstand: prayer beads, a bell, and two portraits of lamas, each in a hand-carved wood frame. Asia was also awake, the cone of light from her headlamp illuminating the photocopy of her father’s journal she had brought with her.
Writing in my journal, seeing her read her father’s journal, brought to mind the entry I had made in an earlier journal of that fateful day of October 13, 1980, when our team had left Camp 1 to scout the route to Camp 2. I recalled how the four of us—Yvon, Jonathan, our friend Kim Schmitz, and me—made steady progress on a cloudless day following a storm. We arrived at a suitable location for our new camp, cached our loads and started down. I remembered how the soft snow was on top a harder layer, and how that indicated danger of an avalanche, but then we were almost back at our Camp 1—I could see the tents just below us. And that was when the slope started to slide from under our feet. So many times on the trip with Asia I had the sensation of past melting into present. The sight of her hiking in front of me would carry me back in time as a smell can trigger a memory long forgotten, and there he would be, walking ahead on a day long in the past. She had her mother’s dark hair and Japanese eyes and high cheekbones, but she owned her father’s long legs and fair skin. She wore a Tibetan necklace of turquoise and coral given to her by a friend for good luck on our journey, and she carried her father’s Tibetan prayer beads. The day before we left, my 16-year old daughter—who, as they both grew older, would become close friends with Asia—cut Asia’s hair short, the two of them on our veranda, giggling as the long locks of black hair fell to the tile floor.
When we began our journey—our pilgrimage—I worried about Asia’s asthma, her vulnerability to cold, even her bug phobia. At first there was a kind of cautious formality between us. Still, I was confident that when the pieces of the trip fit together it would give her a more clear picture of her path forward. It was my idea that our journey would have been just the kind of trip her father would have taken her on. Now, lying in bed in the Konka Gompa monastery, I decided to test my assumption.
“Asia?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think is the most important thing you’re getting from your father’s journals?”
“His ability to always improve himself, I think. And maybe to realize it’s a job that never ends. But to be honest, I think you’re getting more from his journals than I am, because you knew him.”
“You’ve got a good point.”
“I’m getting more out of seeing what you get from them. You’re real to me. Your stories—I’m learning from them.”
“Thanks for telling me that.”
“Good night, Rick.”
She turned off her headlamp. Our friend the old monk was in his bed, asleep. I blew out my candle, and in the darkness took off my parka and cozied into my sleeping bag. I thought of some of the stories I had told her during our journey, about standing on the summit of K2 not as a victor but just trying to be a survivor, about coming home and over time realizing that if I could do that, I could do a lot of things. The story of my first big adventure when, as a teenager, I helped sail the small sloop to Tahiti. Then the story of sitting at the base of a nearly unknown massif in Bhutan and burning the maps we had worked so diligently to draw.
In the darkness I could hear the rush of the river below the monastery. Before I fell asleep I had one more thought: if I were caught in the same avalanche now that I was 50 years old, would I have the wisdom to ride the cascading snow not in fear but in wonder? *****
A little over a month after I returned from that ill-fated 1980 trip, Jonathan’s widow, Geri, and Asia, who was 14 months old, visited me in California. In the years that followed, I only stayed in loose touch with Asia; Yvon and I had her out to his family’s place in Jackson Hole when she was about ten, and we taught her how to climb and let her steer Yvon’s old Subaru. But other things filled my life—marriage, expeditions, my own three children. Her mother told me Asia was a good student, that she loved skiing and hiking in the Colorado Rockies, where they lived. Geri never remarried, and they remained a household of two. In high school, Asia discovered snowboarding and made the U.S. Junior team. Then, toward the end of her freshman year at the Universityof Colorado, Asia called to say she hoped to come to California for the summer and wondered if she could stay with us in Ojai. Her ambition was to follow her father’s footsteps and become a professional photographer. By then I had started an agency representing outdoor photographers, so that summer she worked part-time for my company.
After she’d been with us a couple of weeks, I took her to a small café for lunch. I told her about the avalanche, how the four of us roped together were trapped in the tons of cascading snow sweeping down the steepening slope, how as the snow catapulted over a cliff I knew I was dead, how it then slowed and stopped and started again and finally stopped, how I was somehow still alive but the others—Yvon, Kim, and her father Jonathan—were all injured in varying degrees. I told her how I had held her father in my arms, locking eyes—me telling him it would be okay, we are all still alive, how his eyes had rolled back in this head and his breathing stopped and I breathed into him and it started and stopped, how we had carried her father’s frozen body to a nearby promontory and built a bier and covered him with rocks and strung prayer flags above his grave.
“I don’t know,” she said after I finished the story, shaking her head. “Somehow it still seems like a story. All my life, people have asked, ‘What does your father do?’ and I’ve answered, ‘He was a National Geographic photographer, but he was killed when I was a baby’, and they answer, ‘Wow, that’s incredible.’ It doesn’t sound real to them, and in a way it’s never been real to me.”
“My mother didn’t want to talk about him. The only connection I ever had were his photographs, mostly pictures of Nepal and the Himalayas. I knew that was his favorite place, and that’s why he gave me my name. When I was eight, I had this idea that if I could somehow go there, I would be able to figure out who he was. I still want to go.”
I assumed she was going to ask me to help her get to Nepal. I was already forming my answer—that I could contribute half, but she would have to work for the other half—when she told me what she had in mind.
“Would you take me to Tibet? To Minya Konka? To climb up the side and find my father’s grave?” *****
I didn’t give her an immediate answer; I had to talk to my wife.
“Of course you’re going to take her,” Jennifer said. “Asia isn’t just asking you to help her find her father. She’s asking you to be her father.” I remembered the journey Jonathan and I had planned. What if I did the same trip with Asia, in reverse? We could start in the Khumbu, hiking to Everest Base Camp, going with some of the same Sherpas from our expedition in 1976, Sherpas who had become Jonathan’s friends. Then we could go overland to Tibet. Maybe we could climb a peak? But the snow on the mountains in eastern Tibet was often wet with monsoon moisture, creating avalanche conditions; even considering that gave me goose bumps. But in western Tibet to snow was dry and stable. If we went there we could also join the pilgrims making the sacred kora—the circumambulation—of Kailas, the most sacred mountain in Asia and something Jonathan had dreamed of doing. We could continue to the remote Chang Tang plateau, perhaps to the Aru Basin, the area where for nearly a century the only Westerner to see it was the famed wildlife biologist George Schaller, whose books and articles about the region I had devoured. Perhaps we could find a mountain there to climb, in what Schaller had named the Crystal Mountains? Then we would re-cross Tibet, to Minya Konka, to climb up the side of the mountain and try to find Jonathan’s grave.
Her reply was instant. “Yeesss!” she exclaimed, with the same enthusiasm her father had used whenever he encountered anything that delighted him, when he called out “Woo-wee!”
Our journey to Everest and Nepal, across the open alpine steppe of the Chang Tang Plateau to the monsoon-swept mountains of eastern Tibet, took two months. In the Khumbu, we hiked with the Sherpas who knew and revered Jonathan. We joined hundreds of Buddhist pilgrims making the three-day trek around Kailas. In the Crystal Mountains, we climbed to the summit of an unclimbed, unnamed 21,000-foot peak. Returning overland to Lhasa—a 4-wheel off-road drive of more than 1,000 miles—we flew to Chengdu and arranged for a vehicle to take us on the three-day drive to the trailhead leading to Minya Konka.
At the end of the first day of our drive we checked into a dingy hotel in the small city of Ya’an that I realized was perhaps the same government guesthouse where we’d spent the night in 1980, when I had shared a room with Jonathan. I recalled how then I had a fever from a flu, and had trouble sleeping. I turned and saw Jonathan in the bed next to me, covered in a veil of mosquito netting. His head, framed by the blanket beneath his chin, was illuminated by pale moonlight. He was sleeping with his mouth open, and his breathing stopped, started again, stopped, started.
A few weeks later, after the avalanche—when we were on our way home—we stayed in the same guesthouse, and I stayed in the same room, only now I was with Yvon, who moaned in pain as he lay down. I told him about my distorted vision, about the visage of Jonathan’s face through the gossamer netting.
“He looked different, in a way I’d never seen him before,” I said to Yvon. “I realize now he looked like he did just after he died, when I was holding him in my arms.” *****
When I woke in the Konka Gompa monastery where Asia and I shared the small room with the old monk, it was still dark, but the parchment window carried a faint glow. There was no sound of rain, only the rush of the river, but even at a distance it was an undertone that left a disquieting power. I slowly unzipped my sleeping bag, and with photographs and binoculars descended the steep stairs to the courtyard. Outside the monastery, I could see up-valley a gray blanket of clouds obscured all but the lowest flanks of Minya Konka. I removed the photographs from the envelope and studied them. I had circled the place on the buttress where we had buried Jonathan, but there were too many clouds to see it now.
Over breakfast Asia and I formed a plan. We would take a minimum of equipment and food and hike up the lateral moraine of the glacier to the alpine meadow where, in 1980, we had set up our advanced base camp. Then the next day, weather permitting, we would try and find her father.
The monks gathered in front of the gompa to wish us good luck. In a half-hour we reached the river rushing over glacial boulders. It was too wide to cross. Scouting upriver, we found a single wet log spanning a narrow. On the other side, we climbed a steep slope thick with rhododendron dewy in the heavy fog. We twisted through the thicket, careful not to grab branches of wild rose. We gained the crest of the moraine, and followed it for an hour. There was a dark squall approaching. I wasn’t sure where we were, but finding a narrow flat I decided to camp. We had just finished pitching the tent when the squall hit. Inside, through the nylon fabric, I could see a flash of lightning, and it brought a memory of the hours after the avalanche, when I had descended to Base Camp and everyone had then grabbed their packs and left to help Yvon and Kim, when I was alone and there was lightning and then thunder that seemed to sound for the departure of Jonathan’s soul.
All night, I listened to the sound of rain hitting the tent. I found my headlamp and shone it on my travel alarm: 4:00 a.m. Pointing the beam out the tent door on a small bush at river’s edge I had identified as a marker, I could see that he river was within an inch of jumping its bank and flooding our tent. In this weather, I thought, I could never find the grave. Still, I went through my mental checklist—compass, headlamp, lunch, camera, film, reference photographs, binoculars—and started the stove to make tea. I gave Asia her mug, and she sat up and thanked me. Then the rain stopped.
“What do you think?”
In the moonlight I could see the tip of a lateral glacier hanging like a tongue out of the clouds.
“It’s starting to thin,” I answered. “Maybe we can pull this off.”
By dawn we were packed and on our way, following a yak trail paralleling the river. The last time I had walked this path, my arm was in a sling. Yvon was behind me, his breath shortened by pain in his ribs. Kim was further back. He had two broken ribs and what later we would learn were two cracked vertebrae. We had trussed his torso with two foam pads and given him ski poles. He moved in halting steps, his lips tight. His blue eyes, clouded with morphine, seemed to focus on the middle distance, even when you talked to him.
The moraine squeezed against the river, and Asia and I were forced to hop from boulder to slippery boulder. We decided to climb the loose moraine, where at the crest we found a faint trail. Ahead I could see three parallel buttresses descending out of the clouds, one of them familiar in a vague way. Looking through binoculars I compared what I saw to the photographs.
“Do you know which one it is?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered. “It doesn’t look the same.”
Then I realized what had happened. In 20 years, because of global warming, the lateral glaciers had receded so much I didn’t recognize them.
“Look,” I said, pointing to the photograph. “The glacier was here in 1980, and now it’s way up there. But see these rocks? I think this is the one next to where the avalanche stopped. We buried your father just to the left, right about here.” *****
The crest of the moraine sharpened such that I had to walk with my arms out for balance. Asia was about 20 yards behind, seemingly absorbed in her thoughts as I was in mine, reliving that day in 1980 I carried her father to his burial platform, how the sun warmed one side of my face while his frozen body cooled the other side.
Ahead I recognized the meadow where we had set up our advanced base camp. Looking up, I could see the route we took to the base of the buttress, and I angled towards it, keeping a steady pace, looking back to check on Asia. She was maintaining our separation, and I had the feeling she wanted it that way, maybe to collect her thoughts. The layer of clouds that had filled the valley continued to lift. In an hour I reached the top of the scree and stopped to drink from my water bottle. Asia arrived and we were quiet. I could see above us another few hundred yards the place where I thought the avalanche had stopped, and where to the left we had buried Jonathan. I studied the area with binoculars, but if his grave was still there it must have been hidden behind the foreground cliff. There was a route upward to the right, but it was under a serac that teetered at the end of the glacier. I had no memory of the terrain being as difficult as it appeared. We continued up, to the base of the steep section.
“I’m scared.”
“It only looks hard,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder. “I know you can do it.”
“It’s not that. I’m scared of what we’re going to find.”
“Do you still want to do this?”
She nodded her head affirmatively, but didn’t say anything.
“You go first, so I can spot you. There’s a foothold here, then two handholds right there. Go up a few feet, then we’ll go left into that little dihedral.”
“OK.”
“I’ll be right behind you.”
Asia placed her boot on the first foothold, then reached for the handholds and moved up. I didn’t know for certain what was going through her mind, but her body moved with athletic grace. I made the same moves behind her, mindful to move only one hand or foot at a time to maintain a firm hold if she slipped.
“You’re doing great. Now traverse left, to that dihedral.”
The dihedral, an inset corner in the rock face, looked tricky, but my larger concern was down-climbing it, especially if it started to rain. Should I turn back? We were nearly at top, though, so I decided to keep going. At the top of the dihedral I led again, through a slope of disconcertingly loose rocks. The crest of the rib was now only ten feet away. I made five steps and looked up. I recognized the slope immediately: it was the place where the avalanche stopped and where Jonathan died.
I took off my pack. Asia was about 50 feet below me, moving steadily. I looked up and to the side. There it was. Jonathan’s grave. How could it be so close? It seemed so far, that morning we had carried him on our shoulders. But something was different. The grave wasn’t as high as we had built it. What had happened? Had it collapsed? As his body had withered? What was that sticking out the side? Faded nylon? Yes. And at the end? His climbing suit? Yes.
Asia was now only a few feet away, but she was looking down, focusing on her foot placements.
“Asia?”
She stopped and looked up.
“I see your father’s grave. Please prepare yourself because it is not intact.”
She looked past me and her eyes froze on her father’s broken bier. Then she looked away, and didn’t say anything. Neither did I.
“I don’t want to go up there.”
“Come to where I am. It’s a good place to rest.”
She climbed the last few steps and stood next to me and started to cry. Her shoulders rose and fell and her tears came from deep inside her. I held her head next to mine and I looked past her to the place where I had held her father in my arms as he died. I was now with him again, with his head in my lap, as I held his daughter’s head next to my head as she continued to cry.
“Why don’t you take off your pack and sit down.”
She wiped her tears and sat on a rock.
“I’m going up there, to have a look. Are you OK here?”
She nodded her head, still wiping her tears. The grave was 50 feet above us. I stepped slowly. I could hear the clink of the flat stones under my boots and I remembered how cold he had been on my shoulder. Then I was there. One leg of his climbing suit was exposed. The nylon looked old and faded and brittle. The other leg was still covered by the stones, but parts of his jacket showed. I reached down to the exposed leg and moved the fabric and… he was not there.
Maybe a snow leopard? It would have taken something powerful to move the stones. But then the griffons would have finished the job. I bent and lifted another stone, and there was his long underwear as bright blue as though it were new. And the label, the old oversized chest label that said “Patagonia.” Where the underwear was torn, I saw parts of my friend, his backbone and his ribs and his collarbone. I shifted another rock. His skull was gone but his hair was still there, in good condition.
I rubbed the strands between my fingers, and was back in time fingering his hair and looking up to Yvon who didn’t understand, and saying, “Yvon, Jonathan just died.” I was in the past and I was in the present and then I was crying.
“Jonathan, my old buddy.”
I cleared my eyes and stood. I would have to bury him again, replace the stones over his remains, and set up the new prayer flags I’d brought. Maybe then Asia could come up, to be at the grave. I looked down, and to my surprise she was already heading to me, only thirty feet away.
“Asia, your father’s clothes are here. But some of his bones are gone. You sure you want to come up?”
“I’m coming.”
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