October 10, 1999

Climbing Everest Was the Easy Part

A Swede bicycled 7,000 miles to the mountain, scaled it, then rode back home.

By JOHN ROTHCHILD

ULTIMATE HIGH

My Everest Odyssey.

By Goran Kropp with David Lagercrantz.

Illustrated. 227 pp. New York:

Discovery Books/Random House. $23.95.



his is at least the sixth book to emerge from the crowd on Mount Everest in May 1996. Jon Krakauer gave us the ''who's to blame?'' angle; Anatoly Bukreyev, the ''don't blame me'' angle; David Breashears, the Imax angle; Lene Gammelgaard, the ''I'm not Sandy Hill Pittman'' angle; and Matt Dickinson, the ''what am I doing up here?'' angle. Dickinson, a novice at altitude, was sent to snap photos of a British actor who trained for a summit bid, but the actor wheezed to a halt (or else he would have written a book) while the novice trudged to the peak. But this is a review of Goran Kropp, not of Dickinson. Just when you thought you'd never want to read another version of the climb that killed so many and made celebrities of the survivors, along comes Kropp to give us the bicyclist's angle.

Erase the tragedy, and Kropp -called ''the remarkable Swedish solo climber'' on the book jacket and, affectionately, ''you crazy bastard'' on the mountain -- would be the most famous of the bunch. So far he isn't, but perhaps his book -- written with the help of David Lagercrantz, a freelance journalist from Sweden, and translated by Ola Klingberg -- will change that. Before Kropp, more than 900 people had summited the easy way (sucking canned air), and a few had soloed the macho way (no canned air), but nobody had soloed the supermacho way (no canned air, no baggage tote from rent-a-yak, no caddying from Sherpas, no food from the well-stocked mess hall, no plane ride to Katmandu). Kropp was up to the challenge. He rode his bike to Everest (nearly 7,000 miles from Sweden), lugged his own gear to base camp, climbed the mountain solo and biked home. To outdo him, you'd have to climb Everest backward.

The bike trip, which takes up about a third of the book, is worth the cover price in itself. Kropp escapes a storm by ducking into a rustic brothel, where he pulls out a map and shares his plan with the hookers. The madam is impressed and offers Kropp a free night with her daughter. Kropp refuses -- he's refusing all support services. He rides on. His girlfriend trails him in a car, but he makes her keep her distance. Once, she offers him a banana; he says no. In Turkey, pesky soldiers use him for target practice. In Iran, street urchins pelt him with rocks and jam sticks in his spokes. He's cut off in traffic by gawkers, who invite him to dinner to ask the same two questions: Do you have children? Do you have a television set?

At one point, his bike breaks down. He hops a bus with his bike for a 300-mile ride to the nearest repair shop, struggles with his conscience, buses back to the spot where the bike broke and pedals the same 300-mile stretch. Except for ferry rides across the watery bits, he's under his own power from his Swedish doorstep to the summit.

Eventually, Kropp arrives at base camp, where he keeps an ear out for gossip and passes along plenty. He outs several notable climbers for lying about reaching summits. On the sex front, or as the Sherpas call it, ''making sauce,'' Kropp reports several saucy incidents. My favorite is the one involving the widow of a climber who died on Everest. She travels to base camp to honor her husband and becomes a late-night regular in the tent of a Russian guide, Bukreyev. Kropp doesn't deny subzero conjugal visits with his girlfriend, although they continue to sleep in separate tents. Here's another tidbit that could make an enterprising climber some money: in lieu of the usual prayer flag or trinket, Pittman, the so-called designer climber who brought her own cappuccino machine, may have planted an expensive necklace at the top of the world. A Sherpa with a metal detector could dig it up and finance his retirement.

Kropp doesn't dwell on his actual climb, which is O.K. by me, since coughing, gasping for breath, insomnia, appetite loss, diarrhea and falling in crevasses are well covered in the other books. The best part is how he turned back 350 feet from the summit on the first try because it was too late in the day for him to get down safely. Kropp wasn't as crazy as the guides who ignored the clock, lost their lives and imperiled their clients.

The last third of the book takes a sober turn, as Kropp recounts the tragedy and pays his respects to the victims. But what makes the book special is his own quirky story. That he makes frequent fun of himself adds to the charm. It ends with him planning to sail to the Antarctic and ski to the South Pole. ''The problem is that I have never sailed before,'' he writes, but maybe he'll just row.

John Rothchild, the author of ''A Fool and His Money,'' has climbed 20 of Colorado's highest peaks and Mount Kilimanjaro.