The Ultimate High : Adventure: Jim Wickwire came close to the top of the world--twice. Then he hit 50 and swore off Mt. Everest. Until now.

Affirmation of life is not in facing death; it’s in facing life.

And so it is that after three decades climbing into the ice and cold and thin air of the world’s great peaks, after turning his back on the highest summit of all, after giving up mountaineering and promising his wife that he was home to stay--after all that--Jim Wickwire changed his mind.

He is going back.

To Everest.

“The reasons are not entirely clear to me,” Wickwire, 52, says to the obvious.

The day someone can answer Why climb? is the day men and women won’t have to. Until then, many will follow the bootsteps of Jim Wickwire, one of America’s most extraordinary and accomplished high-altitude mountaineers.

Here, on the hanging edge of human challenge, where strength and youth are consumed at blinding speed, where experience often means caution and caution means quitting, Wickwire perseveres. In an era when high style and big-money patronage dominate even so arcane an endeavor as mountaineering, Wickwire is a special case indeed: part timer, plain talker, privateer, family man, career man, lawyer.

His is an extreme and elegant obsession.

Along the way, he has survived bone-breaking falls with luck and uncommon determination. One horrible night, alone at about 28,000 feet in the Himalayas, he endured a bivouac that Climbing magazine described as “one of the most notorious in mountaineering history.”

He has given parts of his toes to frostbite, undergone lung surgery, suffered pleurisy, pneumonia and more. For all his strength and vitality, his wife has seen him come home shriveled in a wheelchair.

And four teammates, alongside him during those years, have fallen to their deaths.

“I’ve been involved in a fair number of tragedies, so some people consider me on the bold side,” Wickwire volunteers. “That’s wrong. I’m really quite careful where I go and who I go with.”

His achievements have been breathtaking: Americans had tried for 40 years to get to the top of the Himalayan peak K2, second highest in the world and most eye-pleasing. Wickwire and partner Lou Reichardt stepped arm in arm to the summit in 1978. Wickwire pioneered several major northside routes on Mt. Rainier in Washington and has been credited with 20 or more other Cascade firsts. He has climbed McKinley in Alaska and peaks in Europe and South America as well.

Now, his forthcoming expedition to Everest promises to be his most watched ever--a two-man lightweight assault up the 29,028-foot peak with fellow Washingtonian John Roskelley, 44, who is widely regarded as the nation’s foremost Himalayan mountaineer.

The big peak has turned each back before. This will be Wickwire’s third try and Roskelley’s fourth.

Everest is not such a complicated mountain, hardened mountaineers will tell you. K2, they say, is a more difficult and exquisite challenge. And any number of smaller mountains are more mysterious and dangerous. But Everest still is the mountain, even if its base swarms with tourists and rubbish. The best have to climb it.

On a recent spring afternoon, Wickwire is at his law office near the Seattle waterfront, his desk covered with typed legal documents and lined yellow pads. His tie is European and stylish, his hair a glossy black-cum-gray, his handshake like a rock.

He talks fast; even just in the telling, there is much to plan, so very much to overcome, such challenges ahead. His animated expressions belie a demeanor so utterly serious that he appears to concentrate on even little things such as sipping his tea.

He talks about his unpublicized decision, three years ago, to quit mountaineering. It happened in Tibet, on the then-unclimbed peak Menlungtse, 30 miles from Everest. Above Wickwire, a lead climber moved across a ridge on a windblown, packed-snow cornice. Suddenly, the leader’s ice ax plunged through the thin crust, revealing nothing beneath but blue sky.

“I sized up this climb as beyond me technically,” Wickwire says. “So in the middle of the trip, in typical fashion, I said it’s time to stop doing this. Maybe it was that I was going to turn 50, I don’t know.”

Others went on, but none reached the top.

He returned to tell his wife, Mary Lou, and their five children of his decision. He canceled the expensive mountaineering rider on his life insurance policy. He told his law partners and clients there would be no more of these long interludes away.

A year later, a familiar urge welled from somewhere deep inside. Wickwire soloed a couple Cascade peaks in Washington state to see if the mountains still thrilled. They did--as did old thoughts of Everest.

Maybe, he explains, it was the death of his father, a retired judge who ate right, lived right, didn’t drink or smoke and still died of cancer: “I watched him go in 1990. You say to yourself, you want to have as few regrets as possible about what you did and what you didn’t do, and about what you tried. I didn’t want to look back in 20, or maybe 30 years if I’m lucky, and say I didn’t try.”

Or maybe it was a matter of pride, even vanity. In Europe, where mountaineering is widely followed, Wickwire would be a celebrity. In America, though, only one thing pops into the public mind when he is introduced as a great mountaineer.

“You constantly get the question, ‘Oh, you’ve climbed Everest haven’t you?’ ” he says.

“No I haven’t,” he swallows and answers.

*

Wickwire first tried Everest in 1982 with a traditional, large-scale assault. The team established camps along the route and shuttled equipment and provisions, building incrementally toward the top. About 2,500 feet from the summit, Wickwire and three other climbers were tied into a rope affixed to the steep ice.

Suddenly, a climbing harness failed and Marty Hoey, who sought to be the first American woman to the top, fell. Wickwire yelled for her to grab the rope. She missed and plummeted into the mists below, dropping more than a mile to her death. The expedition soon folded.

Wickwire returned two years later with Roskelley and others from the ’82 team. The two men and Phil Ershler, another Washington climber, made it to 27,000 feet.

Committed to trying for the summit without oxygen, Roskelley turned back at 28,000 feet, unable to maintain his body temperature against the cold weather. Wickwire and Ershler had only one bottle of supplemental oxygen left between them. Wickwire says a sixth sense told him not to go higher, but he urged Ershler to try.

Ershler made the summit alone.

Wickwire came off the mountain without regret. After all, K2 meant the most to him; only one mountain picture adorns his brick office wall--the hallowed pyramid K2.

His K2 climb--and his survival afterward--fixed his place in American mountaineering history. As it happened, after making the summit that afternoon of Sept. 6, 1978, Wickwire lingered happily in the lengthening shadows of the Himalayan massif. His partner, Reichardt, headed down. At some point, Wickwire realized he could not make it back to the camp below before dark. Despite the desperate draw of shelter and warm soup, he knew that moving on the mountain at night would be suicide.

Exhausted from the climb up, and suffering from lack of fluids--the mountaineers’ constant nemesis--Wickwire hunkered down a few hundred feet beneath the summit for the long night. He had nothing but his clothes and a thin nylon sack to protect him from the furious winds and unimaginable cold.

Such conditions have claimed many mountaineers. But Wickwire endured, staggered down the next morning and came home in a wheelchair, his lungs injured, his feet frostbitten, his vocal cords paralyzed. And he was lucky at that, his survival described as a miracle.

By 1980, Wickwire was back at full strength--and back on McKinley. Weather turned him back.

In 1981, he tried again, and on a remote approach, he fell into a hidden crevasse with partner Chris Kerrebrock. Wickwire broke his shoulder in the fall but chiseled steps into the ice with his good hand and climbed out. Kerrebrock was wedged even deeper, immobilized, and no amount of Wickwire’s one-handed struggle could free him.

Kerrebrock, 25, died, stuck in the crevasse. It was days before Wickwire reached help.

*

Such experiences wear deep grooves in a man’s thinking. And Wickwire says his views have evolved:

“I used to be naive enough to think that going out and climbing to the edge--my edge--confronting mortality was a way of pushing it back, making it recede. You came back alive and were better able to face the rigors of daily life. . . .

“Then I went through a phase where I think I saw things more objectively, maybe more bleakly about the risk in the mountains.”

Where is he now?

“Climbing, going to Everest, has a very strong appeal--to go up there and push it,” he says. “But I don’t think I’m going there with any notion of beating death. The emphasis is on the living.”

Roskelley’s virtuosity in the mountains is such that he can be mighty choosy about climbing partners. He teams with Wickwire, he says, for reasons that seem as obvious as they are crucial: “I trust him. His longevity translates into safety--for him and for me. And I like being around him. He’s intelligent and he can talk about something besides climbing.”

The two plan to leave Seattle on June 26. The trip is expected to cost $45,000, which means they must spend many hours expanding their list of four sponsors and assembling their equipment.

They will attempt the mountain from the north, or Tibetan, side, and two porters will help maintain a base camp at 17,000 feet. The minimalist endeavor pales next to military-style expeditions that may have 15 climbers and nearly as many high-altitude load bearers.

Wickwire and Roskelley plan to spend a month or more climbing up and down Everest and lower nearby peaks, acclimating to the stress, cold and low oxygen of high altitude. They may cache an emergency tent or fuel bottle on the mountain.

Without support camps or extra provisions, weather will be critical. There will be no way to ride out a major storm once they are high on the peak. Late in August, they will look for a break between monsoon storms and autumn winds.

When conditions look clear and calm, they will head out one morning with 35-pound packs from a 21,000-foot advance camp. They will allow four days. They should get to 25,000 feet the first day, 27,000 the second. They hope to reach the summit on the third and return on day four.

Last year, Wickwire and Roskelley tested themselves one last time, on the icy McKinley in Alaska, North America’s highest.

“I wanted to see if I still had the right stuff,” Wickwire says. On the way up, eight days of bad weather interfered, diverting the pair to help with rescues of other climbers. Nearly out of supplies when the weather broke, they climbed from 16,000 feet to the 20,320-foot summit in seven hours.

Wickwire knew they were ready.

As a lawyer, Wickwire routinely computes the odds of success. Not so with climbing. He will be 53 when he approaches the summit of Everest this year. The only older American to reach the top was 55-year-old millionaire entrepreneur Dick Bass in 1985. A 54-year-old Russian also made it.

Wickwire would be the third oldest, and he knows he will want it very badly this time. He is leaving important decisions until he is on the mountain, including the final summit route and the use of bottled oxygen. Roskelley long ago forswore the extra boost of oxygen.

“Clearly the variables are your health, the weather and the conditions you find on the mountain,” says Wickwire.

“All three of those have to come together at the right time. . . . When you’re so committed to the summit, the hard thing is to know when to turn back.

“It’s obviously pointless to go if you don’t come back.”