No Room at the Top

For mountain climbers the news over Memorial Day weekend was grim but not really surprising. At Yosemite Valley in California, the body of Derek Hersey, a renowned Alpinist whose unforgiving specialty was rock-wall climbing done solo and without the protection of belays, was found below Sentinel Peak. And on Alaska's Denali (Mount McKinley), descending unroped in darkness down an icy chute called Orient Express, Charles Cearley, 40, a mountaineer from Seattle, fell 3,000 ft. and died.

The one-paragraph stories that appeared in most of the nation's press didn't tell much. As usual, Hersey, 36, an Englishman who lived in Boulder, Colorado, had been climbing alone. No one knows what went wrong, at what height, on a route that should have been relatively easy for him. It was a private death, leaving too few scraps to make a puzzle. Cearley's fall seems easier to understand. He and two companions had made the arduous climb to the 20,320-ft. summit and back down to 18,500 ft. As they stopped to rest and rope up, Cearley, who was not using his ice ax, lost his balance and slid away.

Other climbers read such details and shrug. Mistake or mischance, there is nothing useful to say. This is not because the deaths are meaningless but because their meaning seems alarmingly personal. They raise the sort of dust that stirs in every mountaineer's sheaf of recollections: soft snow breaks out from under your boots on a steep slope. You slide, gaining speed. Then some mountain god flips a coin, and it comes up heads. You stop sliding, safe as a baby, a few yards above a long drop. Nothing to say.

Another event of two weekends ago, however, the opening of Sylvester Stallone's ridiculous rock-jock thriller Cliffhanger, left lots to say. For one thing, the movie is set in Colorado but was filmed in Italy. The towering white needles of the Dolomites don't look anything like the massive peaks of the Rockies, and . . . ah, the hell with it. What really irks is that all the heroics, the nifty pendulum swings and the human-fly action below the 40-ft. overhangs, are sure to bring more flatlanders into the mountains.

The sorry truth is that too many climbers are there already, at least on the big-name peaks. At the time Cearley fell to his death on Denali, 489 other climbers were somewhere on the famous mountain, America's highest. During the week just before, 147 had reached the summit. "Believe it or not, sometimes it can get kind of crowded up there," says Denali park ranger Kathy Sullivan.

Crowds are worse on Colorado's 14,255-ft. Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park. Last year some 29,000 hikers reached the top, a rise of 53% since 1990. This is a nose-to-tail wilderness experience. Permits are assigned by lottery to climb Mount Whitney, above California's Owens Valley, at 14,494 ft., the highest summit in the Lower 48 states. The limit is 50 people a day in the favored period of late summer, and by the end of April all the slots were assigned.