The dispatch officer sized up Callahan, needling his colleague for more details. This guy’s been trying to open the bags for twenty-four hours, but got caught up in all the bullshit at the provincial level and finally made a fuss with the consulate.” Passing through Kangding at 8,399 feet and on to Litang, altitude sickness hit the journalists in waves, and by the second day, Callahan was shaking their hands as the beleaguered reporter and his cameraman descended to the oxygen-rich air of Chengdu. But going west meant a gradual increase in elevation. The CNN crew was eager to join the search team as it headed west. As the drama from the slopes in Oregon turned from a rescue of live climbers to a recovery of their bodies, the story unfolding in China stirred the public’s desire for a happy ending. The Pacific Northwest drew climbers from around the United States, as there was no finer place in the country to prepare for attempting any of the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks. A trio of climbers on Oregon’s Mount Hood had vanished just weeks earlier, feeding the nightly news reports for several days. Chris and Charlie’s disappearance had started to grab headlines in the United States. The caravan leaving Chengdu a few days ago had included a CNN crew. The air was thin in this part of the country, altitude 12,900 feet. It took a sizable reward to tease out the information needed to land him in this police station in the city of Litang, three days west of Chengdu on the Tibetan Plateau.

In the week since Callahan had arrived in China, he’d been mostly holed up in Chengdu, Chris and Charlie’s last confirmed location, following leads.

He tripped over a colleague’s foot as he pushed out the door, heading for the police toolbox. The nearest PSB officer paused for a moment, stymied by Callahan’s Mandarin accent. “Can we get a bolt cutter in here?” he asked. Christine, dammit woman, Callahan thought, please tell me you’ve left something in here to give us a clue where you’ve gone.

In short, nobody knew where the hell they were. No permits had been requested to help aid the massive hunt. This time, no plan had been left to track their whereabouts. It was an area they’d returned to again and again. Both the terrain and the people in the area near the Tibetan border had captivated Charlie for decades, and now Chris shared his fascination. Explore the SunLit archives at /sunlit.Īt age thirty-two, Callahan was an accomplished mountaineer himself who’d led trips for Mountain Madness and understood the draw of remote peaks in this part of the world. SunLit Excerpt: In 'Edge of the Map,' a true story of climbers lost in China CloseĮach week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author.

Edge of the Map by Johanna Garton