All Elevations Unknown: An Adventure in the Heart of Borneo - Hardcover

Lightner, Sam, Jr.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767907566 ISBN 13: 9780767907569

Verlag: Broadway Books, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

One of the world's leading rock climbers describes how, inspired by a little-known account by a British World War II soldier, he and a companion journeyed into the heart of the uncharted Borneo jungle to climb the mountain Batu Lawi, in an action-filled narrative that draws together the experiences of adventurers separated by fifty years. 30,000 first printing.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sam Lightner, Jr., is an internationally renowned rock climber who is credited with the first ascent of more than one hundred routes around the world, and has traveled to more than forty-five countries. He has appeared on the cover of Outside magazine, and his 1999 ascent of Batu Lawi was the subject of a documentary. He divides his time between Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Thailand.

Aus dem Klappentext

99, when mankind had successfully mapped the surface of the Moon, Venus, and Mars, there were still sections of Borneo that man had nothing to say about other than all elevations unknown.

In the spring of 1999, armed with little more than a description from a book and a map labeled all elevations unknown, Sam Lightner and his German rock-climbing buddy, Volker, found themselves deep in the jungles of Borneo on a mission to climb a mountain that was only rumored to exist. They had only their climbing expertise to rely on and a copy of a little-known book titled World Within, written by Major Tom Harrison, a British World War II soldier who had been one of the first white men ever to explore the interior jungles of the island and interact with its native peoples. He had also conducted one of the most daring and unusual campaigns in military history: In 1945, he had been assigned the near-impossible mission of parachuting blindly into the thic

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1

Fall, 1998

For some reason which I will never bother to ascertain, European phones make different noises than American phones. I sat in my office and listened as bleeps and honks came over the Atlantic in pairs, waiting for my German friend Volker to pick up his end. It was seven o'clock in the evening at my home in Wyoming, but some un-Godly hour in Germany, so Volk was taking a while to answer. I had important news that couldn't wait, and since he is a doctor, he would have to answer the phone. For all he knew, I might be a sick person needing a bleeding or something. Suddenly the honks stopped.

"What?" He said in a startled tone.

"You can't answer the phone that way," I replied. "How do you know I don't have a bratwurst stuck in my larynx or something?"

"I know because if this were a medical emergency, my handy would be ringing," He paused long enough for me to remember that a 'handy' is what people in civilized countries call a cellular phone. "Only you call me at 3:00 am on this number."

"Well, you should be more polite," I responded. "Project Misty Mountain has just cleared its biggest hurdle."

"You found The Tower?"

"Yes I did," I replied. "Now suck up to me for a bit or I won't tell you where the thing is."

Volker and I had originally met while on independent climbing trips to the coastal rock spires of Pha Nga Bay in southern Thailand. Volker had been there for a month before my climbing partner, Mark Newcomb, and I arrived. He had established a number of climbs on the steep limestone pinnacles with his brother Gerd and another German mountaineer named Frank Dicker, but had just sent Gerd home with a medical emergency. While they were climbing a 300-foot vertical wall on a remote island, a small stalactite had detached seventy feet above Gerd and speared him through the kneecap. Volker was only in his first year of medical school, but even Germans have the education to realize that a 12-pound chunk of limestone through the femur is a bit of a handicap, so he shipped Gerd off to be pieced back together, minus the extra geology, in Frankfurt. Mark and I stumbled onto him and Frank just days afterwards, and we all wound up climbing together for the next few weeks. Meanwhile, orthopedic surgeons, clean linen, and probably a geologist, helped Gerd to recover nicely, and I was later introduced to him while visiting Volk in Germany. The three of us had since traveled across the US and Europe, through South Africa, Zimbabwe, Laos, and the Philippines, all in a quest for good rock climbing in places that were exotic and unexplored by most of the world's climbers. Our shared passion for the sport of rock climbing, and the exploration of countries whose names we can't correctly spell, had made the late night phone calls excusable, if not expected.

"So where is the mountain?" Volk was now decidedly more energetic. He went on, "Wait, are you still in Malaysia?"

"No, I'm back in Wyoming," I said. "Now go get a map." He dropped the phone and went off searching. I could hear this and that being thrown around as he cursed in German, and it occurred to me how amazing it was that Volker could slip back and forth between languages. He spoke English fluently, which was a good thing since my German was barely sufficient for ordering a beer. When we were off travelling together, he made a constant game of correcting me in my mother tongue. It was embarrassing to have a foreigner correct you in your own language, but it was something I had to get used to when socializing with an over-achieving German.

Volker had been somewhat of a child prodigy on the 12-string guitar, and he and Gerd, who was pianist, used to entertain parties by playing the two instruments together in classical duets. They were eleven and nine years old at the time. Volker gave up the guitar, but went on to medical school and got his degree, with honors, in the standard amount of time. The difference between him and his peers was that during his Western education he spent a year studying in Sri Lanka and China, surviving a nasty civil war and a bout with malaria, and getting a degree in the Eastern art of acupuncture. He simultaneously received his doctorate in medicine in Germany, then went on to do an internship in an emergency room in Johannesburg, South Africa. These days he is a doctor at a sports-medicine clinic in Bavaria, nationally ranked in sport climbing, and an odd glint in many a beautiful woman's eye.

"I found a map of Malaysia and Borneo," he said when he returned to the phone. "but it's not very detailed."

"Then you won't find our mountain on there," I said. "To be honest, I haven't been able to locate it on any map yet, but I'm pretty sure I know where it is. Just look for Brunei, then look south to the Malaysian border. Right there is the Mulu Region, where Gunung Benerat is. Just south of that, on the Indonesian Border, are the Kelabit Highlands. The peak is one of the higher elevation points somewhere in there."

"How do you know?" he asked. "And how big is it?" He was mumbling in a way that told me he was actually focused on the map.

"No two maps give the same altitude, but it's big enough that the Kelabit, the locals, have legends about it," I replied. We knew from experience that this was a good sign. Every major geologic anomaly, from Devils Tower in Wyoming to Mount Everest in Tibet, is the focus of legend by its local inhabitants. Volker and I had discussed this fact on numerous trips and eventually decided that there was a general mountaineering rule that could be applied: anything the locals have designated worthy of worship, a climber will too (though services will generally be held in a different manner).

Volker and I, like so many of our peers, had been completely enamoured with the sport of rock climbing since our first attempts at it in childhood. We had both grown up in the mountains and as a result had all the basics of the sport down by the time we were out of high school. As 18-year-olds, newly blessed the freedom to decide what to do with our lives, we each made it a priority to visit all of the world's best and most popular climbing areas. Places like Yosemite, Canyonlands, Southern France, and Northern Greece had all been featured on our quests, and to date we had decided that the best climbing could be found in southern Thailand and central Germany. However, we had not seen everything. Not by a long shot. And so the search continued.

Though climbing has always been the guiding light on our excursions, the process of travel itself has become a strong rival. In an effort to alleviate the hateful spells of boredom that settle in on the days when we needed to rest from climbing, we began to travel to places where the culture, the history, and the natural beauty of an area were themselves our rest-day entertainment. Eventually, this evolved into a kind of objective-oriented climbing trip. Reflecting on those trips one might easily confuse our exploring with a masochistic desire to get lost, sick, or shot, in the Developing World. But those are the costs associated with exploring, just as tendonitis and fatigue are the costs of difficult climbing, and had we not endured those pains we would certainly not have seen so many of the worlds wonders.

For example, if we wanted to see city or place, such as the Forbidden City in China or the Kruger Game Preserve in South Africa, we'd page through geologic atlases and old travel guides in an effort to find photographs of interesting rock formations. In some cases, as with our trip to Cambodia, the idea that we just might go climbing drew us to the ruins of Angkor Wat, an 1,100...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Broadway Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0767907566
• ISBN 13: 9780767907569
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 239
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar