In 1981, Christopher Pizzo, MD '76, became the 110th person and the tenth American to summit Mt. Everest. He did it not entirely for the adventure but as part of a scientific expedition. The American Medical Research Expedition to Mt. Everest took place in the fall of 1981 when Dr. Pizzo was just one year out of his pathology residency. The purpose of the successful expedition was to obtain measurements of human physiology at extreme altitudes.
The peak of Mt. Everest is 29,028 feet above sea level, the highest point on the planet, and sits at the border of Nepal and Tibet. In the decade before Dr. Pizzo made the summit, the mountain claimed the lives of twenty-three climbers, while only seventy-four men and women made it to the top. The year Dr. Pizzo summited the mountain, four others achieved the same feat and one person died trying. It is a risky business.
But mountain climbing and other activities in the great outdoors are a passion for Dr. Pizzo. His inclusion in the Mt. Everest expedition wasn't arbitrary; he had already scaled the 23,000-foot Mt. Aconcagua in South America, the 25,000-foot Peak of Communism, the highest mountain in the former USSR, as well as several other 20,000-plus foot peaks in the Himalayas. While he had proven that he was a competent climber, his participation was also advantageous in an unforeseen way.
Dr. Pizzo had put his job search on hold and accepted a two-year fellowship at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, Calif., so he could go on the expedition. The clinic was only about a mile from the expedition's scientific director's laboratory. Consequently, Dr. Pizzo spent lots of time at the lab and became familiar with the equipment. That proved to be the expedition's saving grace.
"We were able to get some of our extreme altitude data because of my familiarity with the equipment," he explains. "When several data collection devices failed in the extreme conditions at about 26,000 feet, I could troubleshoot and get them working again."
The scientists took readings at various altitudes but only Dr. Pizzo was able to obtain alveolar gas samples and barometric pressure on the summit. All that data is still valid nearly twenty years later.
"This was the most ambitious field project ever done in the field of high altitude physiology," Dr. Pizzo explains. "The data was initially criticized by some because it was a field study and not a laboratory study. But similar experiments done in the mid-1980s in the controlled laboratory setting of an altitude chamber confirmed the data. That silenced the naysayers."
Mt. Everest isn't the only 8,000-meter mountain Dr. Pizzo has climbed. In 1983, he scaled Shishapangma in Tibet, and in 1987 he summited Makalu, which he characterizes as his most difficult climb. The team was smaller than the Everest expedition, the conditions were worse, the route more difficult, and he developed pulmonary edema on his descent from the summit. With the Makalu ascent, Dr. Pizzo became the second American to have succeeded in climbing three of the world's fourteen 8,000-meter mountains.
His accomplishment was not planned, it was a "snowball effect," he says. During his many climbs prior to Everest, he established relationships which led to his Everest invitation. That expedition in turn established contacts which led to Shisha-pangma, Makalu, and other mountaineering and high altitude research endeavors.
"I was just really attracted to the mountains, particularly the Himalayas," he says. "I thought they were a very magical place." He also found the study of high altitude physiology and medicine a fascinating sideline to his career as a community pathologist.
Today, the 8,000-meter peaks are behind him - his knees aren't what they used to be, he says. Now he spends his free time scaling 14,000-foot peaks with his 16-year-old daughter, who also has the "adventure bug." He enjoys whitewater rafting as well, adding an extra element of adventure by foregoing a guide or organized trip and leading the trips himself.
"Why pay a rafting guide a couple thousand dollars so they can plan the trip, do all the rowing and have all the fun?" he asks rhetorically.
Dr. Pizzo rafted the Grand Canyon five years in a row - an "obligatory" three-week trip since there is no way out of the 225-mile-long canyon once you are in it. Shorter trips of four days to one week are more common because of his professional commitments at St. Anthony Central Hospital near Denver where he is medical director of the pathology laboratory. His heart, however, is in the mountains, and the Everest expedition will remain special, not as a personal accomplishment but as a team accomplishment.
As Dr. Pizzo says in a paper on the expedition written years ago, "I feel that I was not allowed to reach the summit until I had completely mastered and subdued my own selfish ambitions . . . I could not have attained the summit and the summit science without the heroic efforts of all the others. The accomplishments were team accomplishments and the credit should be spread equitably."
The expedition was marred by an unexpected turn when the jet stream, which usually is above the summit, came lower than normal. The group dealt with 80-to-100 mph winds for weeks on end.
"It was the most stressful situation I've been in," he says. "I watched a couple of other people unravel."
The group had all but abandoned the idea of reaching the summit and collecting the data as intended when the winds suddenly abated. Dr. Pizzo, another physician and a Sherpa porter began the final ascent from the fifth and highest camp at 26,400 feet. Unfortunately, on an earlier trip to this camp, Dr. Pizzo had used his ice ax to help anchor a tent, and now the ax was entombed under three feet of ice. Improvising, he took the closest thing to an ice ax he could find - a tent pole - not realizing it would have been sorely inadequate and would surely have prevented him from reaching the summit.
Then, about one-third of the way up the final ascent, he found a state-of-the-art titanium ice ax that was later determined to have belonged to a climber who perished descending from the summit several years earlier. "It was my Excalibur," he says. "That just further proved to me that what they say is true: the mountain chooses who climbs it."