The jagged summit was within sight of the climbers who had just spent two years preparing for this moment.
But to reach the peak was death.
In 2014, after two years of planning, Mark Jenkins of Laramie, Wyoming, had to make the heartbreaking decision to end the expedition and turn back without reaching his team’s destination of Hkakabo Razi the tallest mountain in Myanmar, the country formerly named Burma.
Summiting Hkakabo Razi had been a bucket list item for Jenkins for more than 20 years.
Jenkins, an elite climber, had attempted to climb this mountain four times before, and this was the fifth time he failed to reach the highest point. If the political climate changes and he can try again, the 66-year-old said he would definitely try a sixth time “in a heartbeat.”
For the first time since the National Geographic special “Myanmar – Down To Nothing” aired and his team scattered, Jenkins has talked publicly about not yet being able to reach the top of Hkakabo Razi.
“Burma is the land of giant golden Buddhas and of bareheaded monks begging for alms,” Jenkins said. “It is a faraway country that conjures mystery, enchantment and magic.”
It is that magic, and a book, that continues to lure the expert adventurer and National Geographic journalist to Burma and other remote regions.
“I had a passion for the country even before I went there,” Jenkins said. “I read an old book called ‘Burma's Icy Mountains’ about the mountain that towers above the misty jungles of Burma which captivated me.”
It was written in 1935 by famous British explorer Frank Kingdon-Ward in which he claimed there were jagged Himalayan-sized mountains in far northern Burma. At the time, nobody believed it.
The Unsuccessful Attempts
Jenkins first attempted to climb Hkakabo Razi in 1993 with three of his friends from Wyoming — Steve Babits, Mike Moe and Keith Spencer. Dubbing themselves the Wyoming Alpine Club, they never made it to the mountain.
Moe and Babits turned back first and the remaining climbers, Jenkins and Spencer, were arrested by the Chinese military. After being interrogated and jailed, they were set free, their mission to scale the mountain over and the first of many unsuccessful tries for Jenkins.
Jenkins did three more expeditions to Myanmar that all failed in 1998, 2004 and 2005. This expedition in 2014 was supposed to be his redemption.
It was also an emotional climb for Jenkins.
Moe had died in 1995 when a whale overturned his boat in the Arctic. In 2009, Spencer was ice climbing in Cody with Jenkins when an avalanche of ice killed him while Jenkins was 15 feet above, belaying.
Jenkins never fully recovered from his grief and carried with him a photo of Moe and Spencer standing on a mountain with wide grins. He had intended to leave this photo at the peak they had all failed to reach.
Instead, in sight of his goal, he bent down and placed the photo in the snow beneath the peak.
“I would say these were not really failures in the classic sense,” Jenkins said. “They are lessons for me. We didn't reach the summit, but I still consider that a success if I gave it all.”
The Last Expedition
Jenkins admits that the failures of the 2014 expedition started before his team had even arrived in Myanmar.
Originally, it was his expedition to lead and his dream to finally climb the peak that inspired this particular climb. However, National Geographic appointed another leader, Jenkin’s friend, Hilaree Nelson.
She had never led an expedition and was more of an expert alpine skier than an experienced mountaineer.
This was the first red flag for Jenkins. Frustrated, he agreed, knowing that he would be left behind if he refused. He looks back at that time and says there were times he needed to speak up but stayed silent.
“You just basically see the failure play out,” he said. “I realize now when I plan an expedition, I have to look for all the possible weak points before we go anywhere.”
The elite climbers had been thrown together by their sponsor, North Face. Due to conflicting schedules, instead of training as a team, they did not all meet until they were standing in the airport. As the most experienced climber, Jenkins was concerned when he saw the mountain of equipment that had been brought and his apprehension for the expedition grew.
“It's a complicated story because I actually feel like I bear responsibility for it because I had the most experience,” Jenkins said. “I probably should have tried to steer things early on, but I didn't feel like I had the power to do that because it was sponsored by the North Face.”
Jenkins said it may be a failure in terms of a mountaineering trip, but it's a big lesson in terms of team building as he experienced their team collapsing almost immediately.
“You shouldn't climb mountains if you're not understanding that you could die,” Jenkins said. “If you make a big mistake on an alpine climb, you will die from it. You'll freeze to death. You'll fall off something.”
The Ordeal
Just to get to the base of the mountain, the team encountered various dangers from venomous snakes, open wounds from leeches and burns from the motorcycles. When they had porters, some of them were fourteen-year-old girls that scampered about with huge weights on their backs.
The team traveled by bus, ferry, rickety train, plane, and finally three days on motorcycle until the path became too impassible. The remaining 100-mile trek to the base of Hkakabo Razi was done on foot through thick jungle.
As North Face sponsored athletes, members of the team, including Nelson, would search for satellites so they could post regularly on their social media feeds. More old-school, Jenkins would write each day’s adventure in his journal. Their assigned photographers took photos of the people and the land around them.
“I think their “whys” were different from mine,” Jenkins said. “I don't think they were that interested in climbing. They were interested in other aspects of it and I just saw it as another expedition.”
As his team recorded and shared their expedition in nearly live time, Jenkins was ready to keep moving so they could get to the top of the summit.
“Part of what drives me is just that I am a writer and I'm a climber,” Jenkins said. “I am driven not so much to summit, but to get a story so that I can draw people into my experiences.”
He said that his job is not to just go on an adventure, but to bring it back and write a story that is so evocative that people feel like they're there.
“Typically, you need reflection on that,” he said. “That's one thing that social media will never really have that's important, that writing in a classical way. You do something, you take notes, but you let it settle a little bit.”
It is that reflection that has him looking back on this last expedition to scale Hkakabo Razi and admit, that as painful as it is, he can see all the ways they failed as a team.
“You get a chance to think it through and go, okay, what I thought was important actually wasn't,” he said.
The Climbs Continue
As he faces the end of his 60s, Jenkins is not ready to stop climbing. He has more experience than he did as a youthful 20-something who thought he could conquer the world. And it is his failures rather than the successful climbs that taught him the most about true success.
He had failed his first time scaling Everest, Denali, and other peaks but then was able to go back, use what he learned, and successfully summit.
“I look back and realize that even though I didn’t reach the top, I learned a bunch on each trip,” Jenkins said. “As I get older and more mature, I go back and get it done.”
He is currently preparing for another trip in just a few weeks to South America to climb another peak that he had failed to summit.
“My wife, Martha, and I climbed Cotopaxi in Ecuador, and we tried to do Chimborazo, which is the highest at 20,500 feet,” Jenkins said. “We got blown off by a storm and that just sticks in my craw. So, I'm going back, hopefully, to summit Chimborazo.”
As he trains for his latest expedition, Jenkins is not dwelling on his past failures.
“You fail your way forward,” he said. “You get knocked down, and then you get yourself back up and start realizing what you did wrong, and you go back at it.”
Jenkins has not been back to Burma since 2014 but that is only because the government controlling the country is not welcoming to travelers. If the political strife ends, Jenkins would love another chance to summit Hkakabo Razi, especially in honor of his friends.
“We didn't get to the top, but I also learned so darn much about it,” he said. “The absolute need for vision, the ability to see farther than others, the ability to take risks that others will not take, the ability to persevere where others will give in, and the ability to be decisive and remain single minded.”
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.
