He was surprised that several Western climbers who were friendly to him at base camp after the incident later wrote secondhand accounts on the Internet that were not only critical of him but full of what he and Moro have called false allegations and fabricated quotes.
Mike Hamill, of International Mountain Guides, the company that the fixing-crew chief worked for, wrote afterward, “The instigators were Simone and Ueli. Will these two be held accountable for inciting violence and for their cultural arrogance, or will there be a double-standard?” Garrett Madison, a guide with the commercial outfitter Alpine Ascents International, referred to an “unwritten rule” that climbers should stay off the face during the fixing day (whether this should apply to professional climbers, and not just commercial clients, for whom the ropes are intended, is arguable) and depicted the brawl as a regrettable shoving match rather than an attack by a mob. He too placed the blame for the incident on Moro and Steck. He asserted that after the confrontation on the Lhotse Face, Moro called down to Camp 2 on the radio, saying that he was ready for a “f——ing fight.” Simone Moro responded, when Madison posted his account, “It makes me crying to read that false, false, false and pure invented fact. I NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, did that radio call and provocation. (I have a lot of witness who can confirm.) Madison INVENTED those words to try to change the facts and give me responsibilities for the tension.”
Hamill and Madison also repeated the crew chief’s charge that Steck had kicked ice down onto the fixing team. Steck told me, “This I know: there was not a single piece of ice falling on a Sherpa.” According to Moro and Griffith, a Sherpa who had been bleeding said later that he had not been hurt by falling ice; he had slipped and hit his face. Madison’s account was called “the Sherpas’ viewpoint”—he had talked to many of the Sherpas involved—but to some it read more like the viewpoint of someone with an interest both in placating restive employees and in reassuring future clients. “He just protects his business,” Steck said.
Eric Simonson, the co-owner of IMG, said last week that he shared Hamill’s and Madison’s point of view. “The commercial companies will put themselves solidly behind the Sherpas,” he said.
Two days after the incident, Sherpa leaders arranged a kind of peace meeting at base camp. The Western climbers and a handful of Sherpas signed a handwritten treaty stating that they’d forgiven each other and agreeing to work together in the future and abstain from violence. Its vagueness implies an equivalence between the Europeans’ imprudence on the Lhotse Face and the attack in Camp 2—between name-calling, on one side, and sticks and stones, on the other. More than anything, it reflected a mutual desire, among the Sherpas and the commercial guide companies, to make the whole mess go away. Steck, Moro, and Griffith signed it, and though they did not necessarily want their attackers jailed (no one has been charged), they were pleased that several of them had been suspended from working on the mountain this season. At the base-camp meeting, Steck told me, “I saw that guy who punched me in the face, the chief from the fixing crew. I looked him in the eye and said, ‘You have stolen my dream. Please don’t do that to another person.’”
Not long afterward, when Steck was back in Switzerland, Moro, who is a helicopter pilot, flew his helicopter up to the Lhotse Face, to recover the body of a Sherpa who’d fallen to his death. The Sherpa who loaded the body onto the helicopter was Mingma Tenzing, the rope-fixing chief. “When he saw me, he looked at me, then looked down,” Moro said.
Steck had thought his relationship with the Sherpas was a good one. Many with whom he’d summited the previous year had approached him at base camp, earlier in the expedition, to say how much they’d enjoyed climbing with him. “Some people treat the Sherpas really bad, like slaves,” Steck said. “I don’t want to be the face for this. I never treated a Sherpa bad in my life.” After the Camp 2 incident, Denis Urobko, a Russian professional climber attempting a new route up the Southwest Face, posted his thoughts, in which he referred to some of the Sherpas as “cattle” and “pigs.” “Inexperienced and self-assured, Sherpa think it’s in their right to dictate the rules and God have mercy if someone decides you sent him a ‘bad glance.’” Steck, whose team had been working with Urobko and his partner, Alexey Bolotov, told me that it was a great relief that Urobko hadn’t been at Camp 2 the day of the attack. “It would have been a disaster,” he said. “Denis was in the Kazakh army. He’s not a guy who would say, ‘Thank you, hit me again.’”