WE LEFT QUITE EARLY. You might leave camp at two in the morning, wearing a head lamp. It could take 12 hours to get to the top. That means at two in the afternoon you're going to be on the summit. For me that's a cut-off time. I need four hours to get from there back to my camp before it gets dark. A lot of people will climb beyond two p.m., and will have to find their way down in the dark. It's much easier to climb up in the dark, to a point, rather than coming down in the dark, where everything is spreading out below you. If you're on the summit, and you start one or two degrees to the left or the right, you're going to wind up in the wrong place.

A lot of people use all of their energy and resources—whether it's daylight or oxygen—to get to the summit. They stagger to the summit as the sun's going down, on the last bit of oxygen that they have in their tanks. How are they going to get down? There are going to be problems. There are a lot of times that people get away with it. But you never hear about the close calls.

The idea [of the Peace Climb] was to show the world that, in the midst of the Cold War, Americans, Chinese, and Russians could come together as a team and reach the top hand-in-hand, step by step, and fly the flags together from the summit. It was very symbolic. Jim's vision was that the first summit team had to be two Americans, two Russians, and two Chinese, on the top together. And that's what happened.

Jim wanted me to be part of that first summit team of six climbers. We'd have to go to the top with oxygen, to ensure we summited together, because if one or two didn't make it, his country would lose face. And I told him, "Jim, I'm not using supplemental oxygen." It brings the mountain down to your level. I don't want that. If I have to train harder or suffer more, then so be it. And if I can't get to the top without oxygen, then I'll never get to the top. I got taken off the first summit team. And I said that's fine.

The first team, which used oxygen, established Camp VII. They were going to be sleeping there. It was very high—28,000 feet. Climbing without oxygen and sleeping without oxygen, I didn't think I could spend the night at 28,000 feet. The "Death Zone" simply means that above a certain altitude, you can't live forever. You could lie in your tent, flat on your back, eat a bunch of food, drink water, and your body would still slowly wither away, because there's not enough oxygen to build tissue. So my plan was not to use that camp, to climb all the way from Camp VI to the top. We stopped there for a while, we climbed into the tent and sat there for a little bit, but we didn't spend the night.

Quite commonly, especially in the early days, people would fix ropes on the rocky parts of these climbs and you use them as hand lines. You can clip into them, you can hold on to them. The lines get weathered, tattered, so you don't really want to trust them, but you can see, oh, here's an old fixed rope. You know you're on the right route.