Dan Webster
Book Editor
The Spokesman-Review
In 1973, on the eve of his successful ascent of the Himalayan peak Dhaulagiri, John Roskelley wrote a thank-you note home to his Spokane climbing buddies.
“Climbing is pitting oneself against a mountain, yes, but this is so very little of what it means,” he wrote. “Climbing is fellowship, comradeship, living at ease with one another. It’s facing peril or enjoying experiences and loving both because you know who you’re with.”
Almost two decades later, the 42-year-old version of Roskelley is a very different animal from that 24-year-old philosopher. He’s a little slower to get up in the mornings, feels the cold a little deeper in his bones and doesn’t stand quite as tall with a 50-pound pack on his back.
Yet, time hasn’t slowed Roskelley in at least two important respects: He’s still anxious to hug the shoulders of Himalayan peaks, and he’s intent on passing on his experience to other climbers.
Besides, he says, “I like to be around the people who do the sport.”
Roskelley’s attitude is apparent throughout his new book (his second), Last Days (Stackpole Books, $24.95). No doubt he’ll reflect a bit of that feeling in the reading he will give tonight [a reading Roskelley gave after his book was published] at Auntie’s Bookstore & Café in Spokane.
In his early days, Roskelley was a climbing phenomenon, a talented, self-assured and tough-as-tungsten competitor who would go on to earn a world-class reputation by participating in 15 major climbing expeditions.
He would scale the world’s tallest peaks, including K2, Makalu and Cholatse, and he would make it to the 28,000-foot level on Mount Everest without oxygen. He would participate in a large-scale ascent of the Indian peak Nandi Devi and later write a book (Nandi Devi, the Tragic Expedition) about the death-marred experience.
And all along, he would do things his way, earning criticism and respect in nearly equal measure by refusing to compromise his principles and never backing down from a fight. On the Nandi Devi expedition, he clashed with group leader Willi Unsoeld and fellow climber Peter Lev over what he considered confusion among team members, divided loyalties and internal bickering.
“Someone’s going to be killed,” he confided to another climber, adding, “It isn’t going to be me.”
“Conviction doesn’t come cheap,” he writes in Last Days. “I absorbed bad press, enjoyed verbal abuse and acquired a reputation as a renegade; but after the avalanche settled, I was still here, digging myself out.”
The mature Roskelley has mellowed a bit. He’s still willing, even eager, to face danger (which is what top-rank climbers confront at every move), but fatherhood – he has a son, Jess, and a daughter, Jordan – has caused him to think twice before attempting anything foolhardy. Thoughts of his son, he says, helped him decide to turn back on Everest, a feat he wanted to accomplish on his own terms.
To Roskelley, those terms include climbing without oxygen, which he considers an artificial aid. These days he’s interested in meeting the challenges he himself sets – no oxygen, smaller expeditions, respecting the environment and native cultures – all of which he details in Last Days, the story of his last two Himalayan expeditions.
In particular, he sees the old days of mammoth expeditions, supported by armies of Sherpa laborers, as going the way of the dinosaur.
“I think the real challenge in the future . . . is not the big peaks,” Roskelley says. “It’s doing the littler peaks with small teams, without oxygen, without Sherpa support, Alpine style.”
As his own career as a top-rank climber winds down, he wants to challenge other to follow his lead.
“My main goal . . . is to give the younger climbers coming up, especially the American climbers, some feedback that they don’t have to go to Everest every time and be successful,” he says. “They can go to other peaks and have incredible climbs.”
He offers ample proof in Last Days, which gives a step-by-step description of how he and fellow climber Jeff Lowe ascended the 21,535-foot peak called Tawoche, becoming the first to master Tawoche’s near-sheer northeast face. Roskelley then tells how a four-man team that he led, faced by bad weather and impossible conditions, was defeated by 23,560-foot Menlungtse.
“I sixth-sensed danger,” he writes. “My intuition is my greateset asset as a mountaineer, and I’ve used it more times than the Pope has used his rosary.”
And so, with his remaining partner in full agreement, he quit the climb.
Last Days was meant to be his farewell to Himalayan climbing. But don’t bet on it. Roskelley may be older, he may be on the verge of turning to an 8-to-5 work routine like the rest of his Spokane neighbors, but he’s not ready to retire. Not completely.
Not yet.
“When I walk away from some of those peaks, I want to get out of the game completely,” he says. “But it doesn’t work. It’s like race car driving or riding a horse. You can’t just step away and walk out. It’s not something you can just drop and quit.”
Some of Roskelley’s climbing accomplishments include:
• August 1971 – One of two men ever to climb the vertical north face of Dag Peak in the Valhalla range near Slocan, B.C.
• May 1973 – Conquered the 26,795-foot Mount Dhaulagiri in the Himalayas.
• August 1974 – Climbed Lenin Peak in Russia with Chris Kopczynski.
• September 1976 – Reached the summit of 25-645-foot Nanda Devi in northern India with Dr. James States.
• September 7, 1978 – Reached the top of K2, the second highest peak in the world, with Rick Ridgeway of Malibu, California.
• May 15, 1980 – Became the first American to climb Mount Makalu, the world’s fifth tallest mountain, located in Katmandu, Nepal.
• May 1982 – Conquered the 21,300-foot Cholatse Peak in the Himalayans, making the fourth time Roskelley has been first atop the world’s dwindling list of unclimbed summits.
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Editor's Note: Pictured above are John and Jess Roskelley on the summit of Mt. Everest in 2003, the first father and son team to summit Mt. Everest together. The duo reached the summit on May 21, 2003, the senior Roskelley at the age of 54 and son Jess at the age of 20, becoming the youngest American to reach the summit at that time.
John Roskelley, a Shadle Park graduate, is regarded as one of the world's top mountain climbers. His first ascents of Uli Biaho in Pakistan and Gaurishankar in Nepal have yet to be repeated. A former Spokane County Commissioner, Roskelley was inducted into the Inland Northwest Sports Hall of Fame in October 2007.