Everest 2013: Interview with Richard Salisbury, Behind the Summit Numbers
This interview with Richard Salisbury is one of an ongoing series I do each season with Everest climbers. In addition to regular climbers, there occasionally I get the chance to speak with those important figures behind the scenes, I welcome suggestions for anyone climbing in 2013 I should interview. Now here’s Richard: Richard Salisbury was as much of an unknown name to me as Elizabeth Hawley in 1998. I was in Kathmandu on my way to climb Cho Oyu when I was told by the clerk in my hotel that I had a phone call. “Who would be calling me here?” I asked myself. “This is Elizabeth Hawley. What is your full name, where do you live? How old are you?” She fired off in rapid succession. Pausing, I gently asked “Who are you again?” With a huff of indigence she simply said “Elizabeth Hawley”. And that was that! I answered her questions politely and hung up not knowing I had just spoken with a legend as famous as Hillary or Messner. Miss Hawley went to Kathmandu some 50 years ago and never left. As a journalist for Reuters she reported on climbs for various news services and the American Alpine Journal, Climb, Vertical and other magazines. Not only has she earned the respect (and fear) of climbers she is also sought out as a resource on routes and “beta” for the mountains. But there is much more to this story. The man behind the numbers is quiet, unassuming and virtually invisible. Richard Salisbury is the brains behind the Himalayan Database. Richard is a retired computer analyst who specialized in databases while at the University of Michigan. A climber himself, he met Ms. Hawley on one of his trips and the rest is history. Each year, Richard takes all the first hand interviews and tirelessly updates the database. To be clear, if you are not in the Himalayan Database, then your summit claim is suspect or unknown. Today, if you have a question about the number of summits, who was first, records, or any obscure question, the answer is within the Himalayan Database. Used by climbers, expedition operators and news media as well as by universities and physicians for research, the database is available for in CD-format. Summiter and fatality lists for recent seasons are freely available on-line at the Himalayan Database web site. A companion book, The Himalaya by the Numbers, A Statistical Analysis of Mountaineering in the Nepal Himalaya, summarizes much of information in the database and is available in printed format from bookstores. I caught up with Richard as he returned from Nepal to discuss the upcoming season, the numbers and, of course, his relationship with the famous Liz. Please meet Richard Salisbury: Q: Let?s start by getting to know you a bit better. You have trekked and climbed in the Himalayas for 25 years. Do you have a favorite area or climb? I have especially liked the Khumbu regions due to many Sherpa friends living in Namche and the western regions where I led treks in the early 1990s into the Upper Dolpo and Mustang regions when they were first opened for trekking. I got into climbing in the early 1980s when I took a two-week alpine course in Washington in order to get the skills to lead trekking groups in Nepal over some of the high-pass routes such as Tashi Laptsa, Sherpani Col, West Col and Amphu Laptsa. Q: When was your last trip? My last big mountain climb was to Annapurna IV in 1991, my last trek as a guide was to Upper Dolpo in 1993, and my last visit to Khumbu was in 2003. All of my recent trips to Nepal have been to Kathmandu to work with Liz Hawley. Q: Can you tell us how you met Ms. Hawley? In 1991 I was leading an Annapurna IV expedition, so Liz Hawley came to interview me as the leader. She brought her notes for Annapurna IV to show me and I had an Excel spreadsheet to show her on which I had calculated the minimal, average and maximum days from reaching BC to summit (as a planning tool for determining the optimal amount of supplies to bring). After reviewing what we both had, I suggested that she consider publishing her information as a database. She told me that she already had a Nepali working on this. But a year later she contacted me saying that the Nepali had gone to graduate school in Arkansas and was not likely to return to Nepal any time soon, and wanted to know if I was still interested in helping her produce a database. So we started our collaboration in 1992. We hired a Nepali woman half-time to start entering the data in autumn 1992. The amount of information she had from interviewing almost all of the teams that had climbed since 1963 was massive. The data entry job was finally finished in 2004 when the American Alpine Club published the Himalayan Database. Q: How do you work together with her in Kathmandu and you in Michigan? We have a system set up where we can both work independently on our own copies of the database. Then periodically I reconcile the changes we have both made to the database by using a program that compares our changes and merges them into a new combined/updated database. Where we have conflicting changes, the program allows me to select the proper updates for the new database. I also travel to Kathmandu twice a year in April and October so that we can further discuss conflicting, unclear or missing information. Visiting Liz during the two principle climbing seasons also gives me a chance to meet many of the team leaders. Q: The Himalayan database, both book and CD, is a massive effort. How long did it take to write ‘The Himalaya by the Numbers’ book published in 2007 and will there be another book? The first e-book edition of ‘The Himalaya