Expeditions in Science and Mountaineering • iBiology

00:00:20.20 SG: Hi, my name is Sarah Goodwin, and I am here today with Louis Reichardt,
00:00:23.19 who is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of California at San Francisco.
00:00:27.26 And Lou is a very successful neuroscientist, and he is also known throughout the world
00:00:32.29 as the first American to summit K2. The first American to summit both K2 and Everest.
00:00:38.16 And on his expedition to Everest, he led a team that were the first to ascend and summit
00:00:44.01 Everest from its East side, and this route has never been repeated.
00:00:47.15 I though we could start with: How did you begin climbing?
00:00:50.04 LR: Well I should say as a kid I was very athletic, and I think that is true of many scientists.
00:00:55.18 I mean they aren't very intellectual as children, particularly if you are a boy.
00:00:59.16 And my family went on camping trips.
00:01:03.09 I would say the mountains were the most exciting thing in my life in some ways.
00:01:07.23 So it was natural to want to explore in the Sierras, which are a wonderful place to explore,
00:01:13.17 and this included trying to get to the tops of the peaks and stuff.
00:01:17.01 And at first even these things like walks when you are young
00:01:19.20 seem like a huge adventure, so I just loved it.
00:01:23.13 And I went on from there basically.
00:01:25.15 SG: What got you interested in science?
00:01:27.19 LR: Well, I got interested, I went to Harvard as an undergraduate,
00:01:31.16 and I really thought I was going to do history or something.
00:01:35.22 I was impressed, I mean at that point, there were two things.
00:01:40.13 I mean, one is, I did take a Biology course that Jim Watson taught,
00:01:44.29 and it was a time when basically the whole concept of DNA to RNA to protein
00:01:50.07 was just being discovered. The triplet code, and so on.
00:01:54.06 And so it was incredibly exciting compared to
00:01:57.20 reading endless thick books on Russian czars, or whatever.
00:02:02.23 So that was a very strong motivating factor.
00:02:07.00 SG: What was your first big expedition?
00:02:09.12 LR: Well the first one was to Mt. McKinley actually.
00:02:11.23 It was purely by chance. A friend knew a friend, and I had never even thought about this.
00:02:18.13 And I just say that Mt. McKinley is an absolutely magical experience.
00:02:21.22 We were there in the early summer.
00:02:23.24 It is very glaciated. You are on these huge glaciers.
00:02:29.00 The sun while it goes down, the light never disappears,
00:02:32.20 and so you get this spectacular light on the snow. Purples, oranges, greens,
00:02:38.26 that you don't see anywhere else, I think, in the world except in the high Arctic.
00:02:43.09 And so we were successful though we spent 12 days in a storm in a lot of cold and with very little food.
00:02:51.29 SG: In grad school you went on the expedition to Mt. McKinley.
00:02:54.25 What about when you were doing your postdoctoral research?
00:02:57.12 LR: Well, my postdoc I actually I did, and I should say, these expeditions...I did two expeditions.
00:03:06.15 One was an expedition to Dhaulagiri and this was just after I finished a Jane Coffins Childs Fellowship.
00:03:12.08 It was our second expedition to Dhaulagiri and one we were successful.
00:03:17.19 And then I did another expedition from when I was at Harvard,
00:03:23.05 between a postdoc with Paul Patterson and Torsten Weisel
00:03:26.00 where I went to Nanda Devi in India.
00:03:27.29 SG: You took a lot of challenging routes up some of these mountains.
00:03:30.22 Why did you decide to take different and new routes?
00:03:33.18 LR: Well, I mean, I think it is like science.
00:03:35.21 There is no point in doing something that has been done before actually.
00:03:39.19 I mean, it is particularly hard to justify taking all that time just to repeat a route.
00:03:48.17 I think that just like in science, you try to do something new.
00:03:54.29 You try to do something that is not in other people's footsteps.
00:03:58.00 So, I have to say that in terms of the beauty, the interactions with the people,
00:04:01.05 I mean, much of what you get from these expeditions doesn't involve climbing at all.
00:04:06.15 SG: So I thought we would talk a little bit about your expedition to K2.
00:04:10.01 So when did it happen, and how did you prepare yourself to go on this trip?
00:04:14.28 LR: Well, the K2 expedition was in 1978.
00:04:18.16 It was something I should say that every American climber
00:04:21.22 would have given their right arm to go on.
00:04:25.14 There had been this history that that Americans had tried K2 in the 1938, 1939,
00:04:32.19 when they had a very tragic accident in 1953
00:04:35.08 where they had this heroic rescue of Art Gilkey.
00:04:37.28 And then the Italians had come in and snuck them out in the 1954 with Compagnoni and Lacedelli
00:04:44.10 And actually it had not been climbed again
00:04:46.14 until it was climbed by a massive Japanese expedition the year before we went.
00:04:52.00 And so when I got the chance to go, which was because I had been on the Nanda Devi expedition,
00:04:59.05 which was actually where we did a quite difficult route.
00:05:02.21 I should say it is an extraordinarily long approach.
00:05:05.00 It is more than a two week hike to base camp,
00:05:07.19 and so you have a lot time to get into shape actually.
00:05:11.12 SG: So when you go on these expeditions, do you expect to summit?
00:05:15.14 LR: K2 trip, I had one child at this point, and another on the way.
00:05:20.14 I went there being very, very cautious actually.
00:05:24.01 And I didn't expect to get very high on the mountain.
00:05:26.21 And so, the summits were very far from my mind.
00:05:30.23 And in the end this trip it had turned out,
00:05:33.09 we had gotten the permit really not at the ideal time of year
00:05:37.26 because it involved some political influence of Senator Ted Kennedy with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto,
00:05:45.25 who gave us the permit, but they had already given the British the permit for earlier in the year.
00:05:49.11 So we had to show up late.
00:05:50.27 And so we ended up in really what was the monsoon system in the summer,
00:05:56.02 in Pakistan, where we spent 68 days above our base camp.
00:06:03.02 And I would say at that end, it wasn't survival of the fittest, it was whoever was left standing.
00:06:09.13 So there were four of that were left standing,
00:06:12.04 and so we got very lucky at the end that we got a break in the weather.
00:06:19.16 And we were able to do it. It was far from a sure thing.
00:06:22.28 SG: So once you reached the top of K2 and started to come down,
00:06:25.26 there were some challenging moments. Could you talk a little bit about that?
00:06:29.08 LR: It was very late in the day. 5 in the afternoon.
00:06:32.10 And I was extremely cold because I didn't have oxygen.
00:06:35.24 I felt I had to leave. My partner was on oxygen, and he had a parka, and was much warmer,
00:06:39.25 and he wanted to take panoramas and so in the end,
00:06:42.05 since we had not used ropes, I left before he did.
00:06:45.18 And we made very different decisions
00:06:47.20 that I didn't have bivouac gear, and he had bivouac gear.
00:06:52.03 And so I came down through the difficult stuff and managed to find a tent around 8 or 9 at night.
00:06:59.21 And he decided about 700 feet below the summit
00:07:04.17 that it would be dark before he got to the difficult part,
00:07:09.00 and so he just made the decision to bivouac,
00:07:11.11 and I think it went okay for awhile, because he had a Blue A stove,
00:07:15.07 but then he lost in changing the cartouches, he lost the little gasket, and he was smart enough,
00:07:22.03 he was inside a bivouac to realize that he couldn't restart a stove without a gasket
00:07:28.03 or he would just have an explosion. And so he had a cold night but came down himself.
00:07:34.11 The next we had two people that had come over to join us,
00:07:39.26 and they climbed the mountain the next day and actually in much better style.
00:07:43.11 And they came down, but that night, we were all cooking water,
00:07:50.16 and they did make the mistake
00:07:52.15 of changing actually one stove while they had another stove lit in the tent.
00:07:56.24 So they had a huge explosion. It was sort of like the Yosemite Firefall.
00:08:02.00 They are kicking all their tent and all their sleeping bag stuff
00:08:04.19 and you see all this flaming stuff going down the slope,
00:08:07.14 and you hope there are no boots or something in this.
00:08:10.00 And so then they had to come over and spend the night with us,
00:08:14.10 which we did, but it meant that we couldn't cook anything.
00:08:16.21 And so the next day we were very dehydrated.
00:08:20.00 Two of us it turned out were, two of the people, were very tired.
00:08:25.20 And so all we did, we got down one camp below where we had a little food, no gas,
00:08:33.05 and nothing to sleep on, except we slept on top of ropes basically.
00:08:38.05 And we had another long day where we actually met some other people on the expedition,
00:08:44.20 where a big storm came in, and I should say that if we had been stuck high on the mountain
00:08:47.22 we would have been in very difficult shape just because we had no provisions at all.
00:08:52.20 And at the bottom it turned out that my partner, Jim Wickwire, who had gone to the summit,
00:08:59.14 and walked down, but he had progressively gotten weaker and sicker, and so at the bottom,
00:09:03.28 it was clear that he really needed to be evacuated. We tried to arrange a helicopter evacuation,
00:09:10.10 but the Pakistani helicopters would not go that high. So our porters, who were Balti porters,
00:09:17.21 so they are Shiite Muslim, had come in to take the expedition out.
00:09:22.26 They had had to spend an extra day without food because we were slow and because of Wickwire's condition.
00:09:30.20 And they carried him out over the whole length of the glacier. That is 60 miles.
00:09:35.05 Really heroically, I think, saving his life, and so it was one of the most, I say,
00:09:42.27 memorable moments in the mountains for me,
00:09:46.21 to have people that we did not have particularly close relationships with before we came,
00:09:52.14 but to see how this sort of human need absolutely brought the best out of them,
00:09:57.01 because if for some reason my partner Jim had not lived, I mean it just would have destroyed
00:10:02.15 our whole sense of what the expedition was worth.
00:10:05.12 So we were, and I think continue to be profoundly grateful to them for what they did.
00:10:11.04 SG: So you summited Everest in 1983. What was it like to be on the top of that mountain?
00:10:16.14 LR: Well it was wonderful. I mean it was a terrific experience. We were there in wonderful weather.
00:10:21.02 We were there not too late in the day, so we spend quite a long time there. I think at least an hour.
00:10:26.23 It was like a warm Sierra snow day in the winter.
00:10:29.06 SG: So you pioneered this new route up Everest while you were an Assistant Professor at UCSF.
00:10:34.12 How did you balance these two major endeavors?
00:10:38.27 LR: I had not thought of doing anything after K2, but then Dianne Feinstein went to China in 1979,
00:10:46.26 to Shanghai to set up a sister city agreement.
00:10:49.11 It was the very first time when the Chinese in a sense were opening up to at least the Western world.
00:10:56.01 And so her husband, Richard Blum, asked for an Everest permit, and got it.
00:11:03.08 And I did not know either of them at the time, but they contacted me afterwards I think,
00:11:09.08 and Dick is a very successful investment banker and he loves the Himalayas.
00:11:14.28 He had done a lot of trekking in Nepal.
00:11:18.08 But he hadn't really ever tried to do anything like this.
00:11:22.07 And so it seemed like just a spectacular opportunity.
00:11:25.12 I mean, people had not been, at least Americans had not been in Tibet since 1950,
00:11:31.20 and there had not been serious expeditions to Tibet
00:11:36.27 since the 1930s, the British expedition to Everest in the 1930s.
00:11:41.23 And so it was wide open. It had every element of adventure in it.
00:11:47.13 SG: Why was the route up the East face of Mt. Everest so technically challenging?
00:11:50.24 LR: Oh, because it had a 4,000-4,500 ft buttress at the bottom of it.
00:11:56.26 And the first probably 1500 feet was quite steep, but very good rock.
00:12:04.05 Then you had a very long ridge, which when we went in 1981 was very heavily corniced.
00:12:11.15 It was very much like some of the Peruvian ridges that you have.
00:12:15.21 And then we had an ice gully that we had to climb up, which we called the Bowling Alley.
00:12:24.13 And this was, of course, because rocks did come down it.
00:12:28.23 And we set up a camp at the top which we called Pin Setter.
00:12:31.13 And then we had about and 800 foot, largely overhanging face,
00:12:35.21 which was generally quite good rock.
00:12:39.15 But it was at an altitude between 20 and 21,000 feet.
00:12:43.05 So it didn't melt out in the summer, and what this meant
00:12:45.28 is that because there was water freezing and thawing,
00:12:49.16 that in fact there were very large hunks of rock that could come out.
00:12:55.12 And so it was... we used many, many different ropes on this face,
00:13:03.03 simply because we were worried that rocks would cut any one of them.
00:13:06.14 And we didn't want to have more than a couple of people on the face at a given time
00:13:11.15 because we were worried about somebody above kicking down a rock on somebody below.
00:13:16.19 And so then up above I'd say, well there was again a very, sort of 700-800 foot run out
00:13:23.02 of fairly steep ice, but pretty straightforward ice.
00:13:27.02 And from then on it was probably the easiest climb up the mountain,
00:13:30.16 but it was this bottom part of the route below 21,500 feet that was especially challenging.
00:13:39.04 And I should say that when you started it you couldn't really see your way to the end of it.
00:13:46.03 SG: So when you see something like that, is it intimidating or...
00:13:48.07 LR: It is profound. It is hugely intimidating. You say, how can you do this?
00:13:52.24 But it is not so different from science, if you think about it.
00:13:57.01 If you want to solve telomeres, or something, I mean,
00:14:00.08 you don't even know what you have to know to solve the problem in many cases.
00:14:07.11 And so you just take it a step at a time, and use your best judgment and hope for the best.
00:14:14.25 SG: So what do you think made you such a good mountaineer?
00:14:17.19 LR: I think it is pure chance. I should say that I think, you know, it does pay to think about things,
00:14:25.03 and many mountaineers that I know have excelled in sort of professional lives.
00:14:31.22 Henry Kendall for example won a Nobel Prize in Physics
00:14:34.15 and was a wonderful climber in Yosemite and also a wonderful mountain photographer.
00:14:39.19 There are many, many physicists into mountaineering, so it is clear that scientists sort of like this.
00:14:46.14 And I think part of the reason they like it is because it involves a sort of same mettles as
00:14:51.22 trying to solve problems but actually in a much shorter time span often than science.
00:14:58.11 SG: Both mountain climbing and science are very mentally challenging with uncertain outcomes.
00:15:02.08 Do you see a relationship between the two,
00:15:04.24 and do you think the similarities between the two helped you be successful in each one?
00:15:09.13 LR: Well, I think there are similarities in the sense that success is very uncertain.
00:15:16.08 I should say the consequences in mountaineering of losing a partner or somebody
00:15:24.21 are much more serious than having a study section destroy your grant, not like your grant.
00:15:30.04 And again it provided some balance to me
00:15:35.20 in the sense that I knew whatever happened to me in science,
00:15:39.09 whether I was first to discover something or second to discover something,
00:15:43.12 got a paper into Cell or got it into some lower journal,
00:15:49.12 that these consequences just simply didn't have the same consequences
00:15:54.28 either on my sense of being as a human being or self worth, or whatever,
00:16:02.29 as what had happened in the mountains.
00:16:07.06 So because the mountaineering is so much more intense, I think you are much more...
00:16:13.03 I should say the friends,
00:16:14.17 even people that I had profound differences with at some point on these expeditions,
00:16:19.19 I should say we have bonds that I think it is very hard to equal in science.

This Talk

Speaker: Louis Reichardt

Audience:

General Public
Educators of H. School / Intro Undergrad
Student
Educators of Adv. Undergrad / Grad
Researcher
Educators

Recorded: April 2012

Talk Overview

Louis Reichardt has experienced both success and tragedy in his efforts to climb the world’s highest summits. Here he recalls his spectacular ascents of the two highest mountains in the world. In 1978, he reached the summit of K2 making him the first American ever to do so. Five years later, he joined the first team to reach the peak of Mount Everest via a challenging east face route that has never been repeated. Reichardt shares stories about science and mountaineering, and discusses the impact of mountaineering on his scientific career and the love of adventure and discovery that is shared by scientists and climbers.

About the interviewer: Sarah Goodwin is currently the Director of iBiology.org.

Speaker Bio

Louis Reichardt

Louis Reichardt

Louis Reichardt is a Professor in the Department of Physiology and a member of the Neuroscience Program at the University of California at San Francisco. His lab studies how extracellular factors, such as neurotrophic factor and adhesion molecules, control neuronal development and function. Learn more at Reichardt’s lab page. Last year Reichardt reached a new… Continue Reading