The sound an avalanche makes when the first crack appears in the snow above you is hard to imitate, but if you've heard that sound once there's little chance you'll ever forget it. It's sort of a woomph sound, says Adrian Burgess, who has heard it more times than he cares to remember.
In the fall of 1987, on the way up Lhotse, the world's fourth-highest mountain, Burgess and his twin brother Alan were swept away by a 150-foot slab of avalanche that killed four other climbers. The Burgess brothers had heard the woomph and they reacted quickly. Just in the nick of time they surfaced from the thick snow - only yards from a 200-foot cliff.Over the past 25 years, Adrian Burgess has lost half of his climbing colleagues to avalanches and the other occupational hazards of mountaineering, while he and his twin have continued to survive. In the face of these odds, Burgess probably thinks about the concept of luck more than most people do.
"Maybe I've been lucky," says Burgess, who grew up in England and now makes his home in Park City. "That's if one accepts that it's luck. But if you accept that it's luck you don't have to learn anything."
When he is not on an expedition, or planning one, he travels around the country presenting slide shows (see the accompanying story) about the lessons he has learned in the world's highest places.
Mountain climbing, Burgess tells his audiences, forces people into an awareness that isn't easy to develop in the kinds of places - both geographical and psychological - that most of us trek through in our lives. He credits much of his alpine survival less to luck than to a sixth sense, refined during 25 years of climbing.
"See, I think we have a lot more going for us in terms of intuition than people realize. Animals in the wild rarely walk across an avalanche area."
Three years ago, he and a friend - a friend who has since died on Mount Everest - were climbing up an ice waterfall in Rocky Mountain National Park. "I had climbed about 30 feet up this ice when all of a sudden it felt too warm and I said, `I don't like this' and I climbed back down." They took another route up the mountain, and it wasn't until later that he learned that 20 minutes after he had stopped climbing on the ice, the whole thing collapsed.
In the Himalayas, the Sherpas believe that the 40-year-old Burgess brothers, because they are identical twins, are endowed with extra luck. Certainly there seems to be proof. A week after the first avalanche on the Lhotse expedition in 1987, as he slept in his tent at 21,700 feet, Burgess came within a foot of being buried by 6 feet of cement-like snow. His brother's tent was not so well-placed - but his brother was. He just happened to be spending the night in nearby Namche Bazar, changing their climbing permit.
Among other climbers, the Burgess twins are legends, too, although not always for their good fortune. "Twin terrors of the Himalayas" is the way Outside magazine summed them up in a 1988 article.
The magazine characterized the Burgesses this way: "In a subculture that is increasingly dominated by clean-living, hard-training, high-profile Frenchmen and Germans and Austrians who pose for Alfa Romeo ads and lend their names to lines of chic clothing, the twins remain low-lying pub-crawlers and brawlers, forever staying just one step ahead of the authorities."
"That's a bit of an exaggeration," says Burgess, who says he and his brother have grown up a lot since their rowdier days in the '60s and '70s. He admits, though, that they don't like to back down from a situation. "And you can say that about climbing, too."
Since 1981, Burgess has been married to Lorna Rogers, whom he met in Katmandu and wedded atop Colorado's 14,000-foot Mount Evans. The couple moved to Utah in December when Rogers-Burgess, an attorney, was hired by a Salt Lake law firm.
Last May, Burgess made it to the top of Mount Everest, but he likes to keep the victory in perspective. "Everyone uses Mount Everest as a yardstick, because it's the highest. But it's not the most difficult thing I've done, or will ever do. In fact, the search is constant," says Burgess, who sees climbing as a perfect metaphor for life.
"You start going on these expeditions and you think it's goal-oriented. But it's not. It's moment-oriented. The goal is only the opportunity to provide the moment. If Everest were my only goal, and if I'd already done that, that would be pretty disappointing."
If you don't have an ultimate goal, says Burgess, "your whole life can be an adventure."
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(Additional information)
Climber will show Everest slides
Mountaineer Adrian Burgess will present "In Search of Everest," a 90-minute slide show, on Tuesday, Feb. 27, and Friday, March 2.
The Feb. 27 presentation will be at Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School, 843 S. Lincoln, at 7 p.m. Tickets will be $4 for adults, $2 for children.
The March 2 slide show will be at 7:30 p.m. in the Behavioral Science Building auditorium on the University of Utah campus. Tickets will be $3, or $2 with a U. identification card.