By Lindsey Schibelhut, Staff Reporter.
For 1962 Delta graduate and climbing enthusiast Lou Kasischke the opportunity to summit Mount Everest was going be the experience of a lifetime. The events that would occur on May 10, 1996, however, would leave eight people to perish on the unforgiving mountainside. Kasischke was left with two struggles: an external one compelling him to complete the summit and an internal one, a “voice of the heart,” urging him to turn around.
On Nov. 9 Delta will welcome Kasischke as part of the President’s Speaker Series to come and talk about his experience on Everest and what compelled him to forgo the summit and come back home to “live a story he could tell.” He will be speaking in the lecture theatre from 10 a.m. to noon. There will be a Q and A session afterward, and he will sign copies of his book “After the Wind.”
Two expeditions – one led by Rob Hall and one led by Scott Fischer – made the decision to summit to the top of Mount Everest on the same day. This led to delays because many climbers ascended the mountain at the same time. The consequences of these delays meant people were “caught out” past the turnaround time (the allotted time to safely summit and descend the mountain, making it back to camp before dark). A blizzard that hit compounded the already deadly situation – eight people never made it off of the mountain – including Hall and Fischer.
Everest is not the first mountain Kasischke has climbed; his other ascents were Mount Denali, Mount Rainier, Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Elbrus, among many others. However, Everest proved to be much more intense than Kasischke had anticipated.
“I did not think it would be as difficult in the extreme that it turned out to be,” says Kasischke.
Kasischke says he underestimated several areas of the mountain including the Khumbu Icefall, which is the first 2,000 feet you climb out of basecamp. In addition, the Lhotse Face, a 3,690 ft. wall of glacial blue ice, and lastly – the “death zone.”
“The death zone on Everest is very unique… because it requires total self-reliance,” explains Kasischke. “There is no helping anybody else, just because the difficulties are so extreme, the conditions are so extreme. You don’t have the physical capacity to do very much for anybody else.”
Kasischke says in the days leading up to May 10, nothing indicated something was about to go terribly wrong.
“I have to say that at the time each decision was made, overall things were going well.”
The expedition had no reason to believe that their teamwork and leadership would soon fall apart, especially with the expertise of guide Rob Hall.
“Rob always had an answer… even though sometimes the answers weren’t to our satisfaction” says Kasischke. “Nevertheless, the moments weren’t right to press any harder on the decision making.”
If Kasischke could do it over again he says he would have done more for teammate Beck Weathers, who was left alone at the balcony (approx. 27,000 feet) on Everest. Weathers was having trouble with his eyesight at that time; the altitude affected his recent eye surgery. Sadly, Weathers would later have many amputations due to frostbite.
“Quite frankly I was standing right there, when it occurred,” explains Kasischke, “If I had it to do over, I would have argued the wisdom of leaving Beck Weathers alone. There’s some fundamentals in mountaineering that are just solid and sacred and one of those is ‘you never ever leave someone alone.’ That should never happen in a serious setting such as where we were. In those temperatures, in those conditions and at that altitude that should never happen.”
Kasischke says (thinking back on the situation with Weathers) if he would have just said to Hall, “Rob, woah, wait a minute, this is not a good idea. We got the resources here, let’s orchestrate getting Beck back down; we’re only seven hours or so away, let’s get him down.” He thinks Hall would have given it a second thought and may have changed his mind.
Once the aftermath of the tragedy had settled, Kasischke made the decision to put pen to paper and write what would later become the book “After the Wind.”
“I wrote the story 17 years ago back in 1997. Nobody read it. It resided in my file cabinet,” says Kasischke.
He explains his reasoning behind putting his thoughts down on what he calls his “pages,” as he never thought of them as a book.
“I needed to solidify in my own mind what happened and why because it was complex and there were a lot of emotions that were mixed in and there was a lot of misinformation being reported,” states Kasischke. “I had to understand it.”
What he also wants people to understand is that the storm was not the cause of the consequences that followed; it was a perfect storm of human errors.
“The cause of the tragedy was human failure,” Kasischke says, “and the storm simply set the price that would be paid for that human failure.”
In the years following, he had lost his drive for climbing.
“It was two years before I could really do anything. It was not a good two years,” Kasischke began, “one of the unsettling things about this bad experience was that there wasn’t any closure in the sense that the people who died get buried and funerals – that kind of thing. They’re not, they’re still there. I know where they are everytime I look at the picture of Everest and they’ll be there for eternity.”
After two years he started to “go back to [his] roots” where his love of climbing began.
“I started doing some ski mountaineering again,” explains Kasischke, “It’s a sport where you climb up [a mountain] on skis and then ski down. You don’t climb to the peaks of anything, but you climb to passes. It was satisfying my internal needs I guess to be the athlete that I was.”
Kasischke was eventually able to work up to climbing mountains again – this time with a different purpose. He adopted the quest to climb two of the most revered mountains in the world both biblically and mythologically, Mount Ararat in Turkey and Mount Sinai in Egypt.
“Climbing the sacred mountains would be more of a personal journey,” says Kasischke. “[Mount Ararat’s] the mountain where Noah’s Ark biblically came to rest after the great flood and destruction of mankind and was thought of as the place of new life, a second chance at life,” he continues, “and since I viewed my experience as getting a second chance at life I wanted to be there on the summit of Mount Ararat overlooking upper Mesopotamia…so that was a fantastic experience.”
Knowing what he went through on Everest, Kasischke will caution anybody, not only wanting to make the summit, but especially for those doing it for the wrong reasons.
“The risks are so extreme, they’re much more extreme than anybody may think ahead of time,” explains Kasischke, “If people are going to climb Everest just for some of the fame or whatever they might think they’re going to get from that, and they’re not serious about the sport of climbing, they’re almost never going to make it,” he says.
Looking back on his experience Kasischke says he learned a lot about his outlook on life.
“They say that the two most important days in your life are the day you’re born, and the day you understand why, and I can say on May 10, 1996 I understood why I was born – my purpose. There was a purpose for me to still live, to fulfill God’s will,” he says.
For Kasischke, being able to come back to Delta, where he graduated 53 years ago, is going to bring his life’s journey full circle.
“It is emotional to come back to Delta and to tell my story. And quite frankly, I am honored to be there. Especially to share my experience with young people, at a place where I sat in class when I was 20 years old starting my life journey,” he concludes.