Authors: Ed Viesturs
Beginning in the mid-1930s, the American Alpine Club (AAC) repeatedly petitioned the government of Kashmir for a permit for a K2 expedition. In those days, climbing in America lagged far behind the standards set by British, French, German, Italian, Swiss, and Austrian climbers. But in 1936, four young American climbers, all of them graduates of Harvard, joined up with four more senior (and more famous) Brits to make the first ascent of Nanda Devi, a beautiful and difficult 25,643-foot mountain in northern India. At the time, it was the highest summit reached anywhere in the world—a record that would stand for another fourteen years, until the French climbed Annapurna in 1950.
Out of the party of eight, only two—the Englishmen H. W. Tilman and Noel Odell—reached the summit. The strongest American was Charlie Houston, a twenty-two-year-old graduate student at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Despite his youth, Houston had climbed in the Alps as a teenager and was already the veteran of two major Alaskan expeditions, including the first ascent of Mount Foraker, the second-highest peak in the Alaska Range. Houston was chosen for the summit party on Nanda Devi, but the night before the assault he came down with a terrible case of food poisoning, and Tilman took his place.
When permission for K2 finally came through, in 1937, the AAC
offered the leadership of the expedition to Fritz Wiessner, a German-American from Dresden who had immigrated to the States in 1929 and gained citizenship in 1935. Wiessner was without a doubt the finest American climber of his day. After putting up new routes on several of the hardest faces in the Alps, he had bagged some of the great prizes in North America, including the first ascent of Mount Waddington, the rugged and intricate peak that is the highest summit in the stormy Coast Range of British Columbia, which had defeated sixteen previous attempts. Wiessner was also the only American with experience on an 8,000-meter peak, as he had served on the 1932 German expedition to Nanga Parbat, where he was one of three climbers to reach a high point of 23,000 feet.
Wiessner ran his own successful chemistry business in Vermont, specializing in the manufacture of ski wax. By the time the AAC got permission for K2, he was too bogged down in business obligations to go to the Karakoram the next summer, so he recommended that the expedition be turned over to Charlie Houston. Oddly enough, that magnanimous referral would be the spark for a lifelong, often bitter antipathy between Houston and Wiessner.
Houston leapt at the chance to lead the expedition. But from the start, he harbored the suspicion that Wiessner had a hidden agenda. The permit the AAC had obtained was good for two years; if the 1938 expedition failed to get up K2, Americans could organize another crack at the mountain for 1939.
Houston’s first choice for the team was Bob Bates, a good friend of his from Harvard, himself a veteran of two Alaskan expeditions. In February 1938, Bates wrote a letter to another Harvard crony in which he voiced the fears he and Houston already entertained: “Weissner’s [sic] idea, I suppose, is to have us do the reconnaissance + possibly the dirty work + then go in next year and profit by our mistakes. This is pretty surely it, but keep it to yourself.”
Houston put together a strong team. Besides Bates, the climbers included Bill House, Wiessner’s partner on the Waddington first ascent;
Richard Burdsall, who had reached the summit of the remote and lofty Minya Konka in western China in 1932; and Paul Petzoldt. Houston, Bates, Burdsall, and House were all easterners and Ivy League graduates—the first three had gone to Harvard, House to Yale. Petzoldt not only hadn’t gone to college, he was a cowboy from Wyoming. But he was also one of the strongest climbers in the country, having pioneered some of the hardest routes in the Tetons, where he worked part-time as a guide. In terms of rock-climbing skills, Petzoldt was way ahead of his eastern teammates.
The sixth member of the party, invited from afar, was Captain Norman Streatfeild, a British officer living in India who had already been on numerous hunting, mapping, and climbing trips to the Karakoram. Streatfeild was not the mountaineering equal of the five Americans, but he would prove invaluable in terms of logistics and dealing with native porters.
When I was still a teenager, long before I’d climbed any peaks myself, I’d read Houston and Bates’s classic
K2: The Savage Mountain
, about the 1953 expedition. I’d loved the book, because it told the story of how adversity transformed a team into an ideal brotherhood; along with
Annapurna, K2: The Savage Mountain
had a lot to do with turning me into a mountaineer. But it was not until Scott and I started preparing for our own K2 adventure in 1992 that I read the book about the earlier American expedition.
Five Miles High
is a collaborative effort: five of its chapters were written by Bates, five by Houston, four by House, three by Burdsall—and none by Petzoldt. It’s a delightful book, the kind of tale that makes you nostalgic for a vanished era of exploration. It also subscribes firmly to the tradition of keeping the expedition’s dirty laundry far from the eyes of the public. There are tongue-in-cheek gibes about certain members’ habits and foibles (for example, about how much Petzoldt liked to eat), but you’d hardly know that a harsh word or dispute occurred within the team. And there is not the slightest hint of the Wiessner-Houston tension that would explode inside the AAC after 1939.
Houston admits in the first chapter that the Duke of the Abruzzi’s
dark prediction still hung over the mountain. “So formidable are the few approaches to its summit,” he writes, “that many climbers have felt the ascent to be impossible.” Houston also baldly declares that the 1938 expedition was conceived as a reconnaissance:
Could we determine which route offered most possibility of success, perhaps a later expedition, unhampered by the need of reconnoitering the mountain, might hope to reach the top. Ours then was to be a preliminary attack whose main plan was to find a way for a later party.
But then he coyly closes the chapter:
We were to examine three main ridges, separated by miles of glacier travel, and to decide which of the three would be most likely to furnish a route to the summit. Finally, given time, weather, and the smile of fortune, we were to try to reach that distant point.
All through the winter and spring before the expedition, the climbers ordered gear and tested food supplies. When you read about the provisions those men took to K2 in 1938, you realize they were closer not only in time but in style to the great Arctic and Antarctic expeditions of the turn of the twentieth century than to our present-day mountaineering jaunts. For instance, the ‘38 climbers brought along fifty pounds of pemmican made in Denmark. Almost nobody eats pemmican anymore, but it was
the
staple of nineteenth-century explorers. Pemmican is a gooey mixture of dried meat, animal fat, sugar, rice, and raisins. It keeps well in the cold, and it’s very high in calories. I have to confess, though, that I’ve never had a single bite of the stuff. We know now that while pemmican may be great in the Arctic or the Antarctic, it’s way too fatty to digest at high altitudes.
The 1938 team tried out dozens of kinds of biscuits and hard bread.
They tested them by dropping them out of a second-floor window and by leaving them out in the rain overnight. They finally chose one brand of biscuit because, as Bates wrote, it “tasted good and resisted moisture, yet needed no sledge hammer to break it.” Bates’s team also swore by some of the first dried vegetables and fruits available, all of them produced by what their makers called a “secret process.” The ‘38 team’s cereals included Cream of Wheat and Maltex. Like all expeditions of their time, the team considered it absolutely essential to bring along large quantities of Klim (“milk” spelled backward)—powdered whole milk, which is almost impossible to find in a market nowadays. On all my expeditions, coffee has been a vital base camp drink. The 1938 climbers brought tea instead (I do drink sweet, milky tea up high), because they considered coffee too much of a nuisance to brew in the field.
When I look over that K2 food list, I’m struck by how bulky and heavy their provisions were. But then I have to remind myself that they were outfitting in an age long before prepackaged dried foods came on the market, or Power Bars or Pop-Tarts, or instant soups, or tubes of high-energy gel. The kinds of lightweight, easy-to-fix meals we relied on in 1992 simply weren’t available in 1938. On the other hand, those guys had luxuries we never dreamed of. In Askole, for example, they hired a hefty porter with a huge, straw-lined wicker basket for a backpack, in which he managed to carry twenty dozen fresh eggs to base camp without breaking them!
There’s the same historical divide when it comes to equipment. Boots, for instance: in 1938, climbers who wanted the best mountaineering footwear available wore relatively thin leather boots, their soles reinforced with hobnails—little metal cleats affixed to the undersurface. The nails gave you better purchase on ice and snow, but they were a real liability on rock slabs, because your feet tended to skitter off their holds. What’s more, at altitude the hobnails conducted cold straight to your feet, contributing directly to the risk of frostbite all early climbers faced in the Himalaya. It would be decades before Vibram rubber soles got invented, not to mention double boots—especially the kind of combination plastic
outer shell and foam inner I wore on most of my 8,000-ers. The 1938 team members ordered custom-made boots from England, and they were so finicky that each man chose the precise pattern of hobnails with which his soles would be studded.
Climbing ropes, at that time, were still made out of hemp or manila. Nylon ropes, which are many times stronger and have a stretchiness that absorbs much of the impact of a fall, were still nearly a decade in the future. The ice axes of the day were three to four feet long and had shafts of hickory or ash, with a straight metal pick and an opposing adze for a handle. They looked more like Victorian alpenstocks (glorified walking sticks) than the short, fanged chrome-molybdenum ice tools we used in 1992.
In 1938, the climbers boxed and sealed all their gear and food and sent it ahead by steamer. On April 14, they sailed from New York, bound first for Europe, then for Bombay.
From the start of the trip, there was a cultural gulf between Petzoldt and his teammates. You won’t find the faintest hint of it in
Five Miles High
, but the oral traditions of mountaineering have preserved anecdotes about it, and glimpses pop up in the latter-day biographies of Petzoldt and Houston.
Petzoldt was too poor to afford the expedition. Instead, Farnie Loomis—a well-to-do Harvard grad and a member of the Nanda Devi expedition who had climbed with Petzoldt in the Tetons and had recommended him to Houston—paid his way. (Petzoldt was, you might say, the first sponsored climber!) In the perverse logic of the day, that tarred the Wyoming cowboy with a certain unworthiness in the eyes of his Ivy League teammates. And Petzoldt’s profession as a guide, just as perversely, could be seen as a detriment on an expedition, not as an asset.
Petzoldt’s first biographer was his wife, Patricia, who thus may not be an impartial witness. But in 1953, in
On Top of the World
, she wrote,
Later Paul discovered that there had been some doubts expressed in the [American Alpine] Club as to whether he would be able to adjust himself socially to the rest of the party. The fact
that he was a professional, a guide, had been questioned; and then of course he was a Westerner and, although he was known to have had some education, he had not attended an Ivy League college.
Houston’s biographer Bernadette McDonald insisted in 2007 that Charlie once called Petzoldt “a blue collar guide.” That sense of a social gulf may lie behind the fact that Petzoldt was not asked to write any of the chapters of
Five Miles High
.
In his turn, Petzoldt referred to Bates and Houston, behind their backs, as “two Eastern nabobs.” According to McDonald, Petzoldt thought that, far from being sneered at as a professional guide, he ought to be paid an extra salary for bringing his expertise to his “amateur” teammates.
Just as serious was the gulf between Petzoldt and the easterners about the kinds of climbing hardware necessary to attempt K2. Houston and Bates had a British disdain for “ironmongery”—the pitons, carabiners, and direct-aid ladders with which European climbers had recently transformed alpinism. Among the expedition supplies, they had included at most ten pitons. Petzoldt, on the other hand, wholeheartedly embraced the new technical gear, without which he could not have forged his Teton routes. On shipboard, a heated argument broke out over this question, but Petzoldt was outnumbered.
Scandalized by his teammates’ backward attitude, however, Petzoldt sneaked off during a stop in Paris on the way to India and used his last dollars to buy fifty pitons at the shop of the great French climber Pierre Allain. (Allain, incidentally, had been a member of the French expedition to Gasherbrum I just two years earlier.) Petzoldt then smuggled the hardware into the boxes of expedition gear. On K2, of course, the pitons proved invaluable.
By May 9, the team had reached Rawalpindi. In 1992, to get from there to K2, Scott and the trekkers on his permit took a one-hour flight to Skardu. That’s the normal procedure, but the flight was overbooked,
and I couldn’t afford it anyway, so I ended up scrounging rides in two antiquated vehicles—a journey that I later called “the 26-hour ride from hell.” On the first bus, a pregnant Pakistani woman vomited out the window at regular intervals. I barely kept from tossing my own cookies. By the time I got to Skardu, I was covered with soot, dirt, and sweat.
After a few days, we bummed a ride on a jeep to cover the last eighty miles to Askole. It was only in Askole that we would actually start hiking, so it seemed that the expedition really began there. The overland journey from Skardu amounted to little more than an ordeal by bouncing truck, shared by a tightly packed band of sweaty fellow passengers. We glimpsed some amazing scenery along the way, but most of the time we were too busy hanging on or too exhausted to care.