Backpacker magazine continued to be good to me, and I was learning to piggyback climbing onto assignments, whether to Baffin Island, Europe, or finally, Tibet. Mark was an old Tibet hand, with many explorations under his belt, most of them clandestine. He’d invited me every few years to join him while he tried to sneak through Tibet illegally, usually on his way to Burma, where he wanted to make the first ascent of the country’s highest peak without the knowledge of its vicious rulers. He was arrested numerous times, had snuck out of jail at least once, and his stories terrified me. Being savaged by nature was one thing; being brutalized by prison guards was quite another. I resisted Mark’s overtures until 2002, when he broke down and agreed to let us get trekking permits to reach a range of virgin mountains, though it was still illegal to climb them. Mark knew these mountains merely from an American pilots’ map (with 1,000-foot contour line intervals) and having passed nearby years earlier while hiding under a tarp on the back of a truck that he’d bribed his way onto. (Fourth paragraph of Chapter 17, The Eiger Obsession.)