Authors: Ed Viesturs
At last Houston gave up and sat down with his back against a large boulder, trying to warm himself in the sun. Petzoldt plugged onward. He reached a point several hundred feet higher than his partner before turning around himself. At 26,000 feet, Petzoldt was still 2,250 feet below the summit.
All his life, Houston inclined toward the mystical. Of that high point on K2 he later wrote,
I tried to look ahead years into the future so as to cement firmly in my mind recollections of these great moments on our mighty peak. There were other emotions too deep to be expressed. I felt that all my previous life had reached a climax in these last hours of intense struggle against nature…. I believe in those minutes at 26,000 feet on K2, I reached depths of feeling which I can never reach again.
The two men started down at 4:00
P.M.,
reaching their tent as dusk turned to twilight. They had a desperate craving for hot tea, but there were only three matches left. Houston recalled:
With infinite care we waxed one of the matches, dried it as much as possible, and struck it. It fizzled and went out. A safety match broke off at the head. Paul in a gesture of bravado struck our last one. It lit and we were assured of our warm supper. Too tired for much talk, we melted water for the morning, snuggled in our sleeping bags, and drowsed off to a dreamless sleep.
The climb was over, but not the expedition. It took three more days for the team to climb carefully back to base camp, retrieving gear (but not the
fixed ropes) as they went; six more days to hike with their porters back to Askole; and eleven more days, some of them on horseback, to return to Srinagar by a shorter route than the one they had taken on the way out. All told, from Srinagar to Srinagar the expedition lasted ninety days.
Exhausted though the men must have been after their effort on K2, they regarded the retreat from the Karakoram as simply the final stage in a three-month lark. For all six of the “sahibs,” the expedition had been one of the greatest adventures of their lives. In the last pages of
Five Miles High
, Burdsall sums up the team’s sense of satisfaction:
Behind us were unforgettable days—days on the march, and days on the peak, whose memories we would not exchange for anything. No harm had come to us or to any of our helpers. In a few days we must say farewell to our Kashmiri and our faithful little Sherpas…. Later we sahibs too must part to go our separate ways, but we knew that our bond of friendship would last as long as life itself.
Alas, the aftermath of the 1938 expedition to K2 would turn out not to be quite so clean and pure. It’s always seemed to me that one of the saddest things that can happen in mountaineering is for teammates to get along well during an expedition, only to have a falling out afterward. One of the best-known examples is the partnership of the Austrian Peter Habeler with the Tyrolean Reinhold Messner. During the 1970s, they set the climbing world on fire, with such astounding deeds as the ascent of the Eiger Nordwand in a then-record time of ten hours. In 1978, Habeler and Messner pulled off their greatest feat when they climbed Everest without bottled oxygen, despite widespread predictions that climbers would die or suffer irreversible brain damage in such an attempt.
Messner and Habeler apparently got along fine on Everest. The trouble came afterward, in the discrepancies between the books the two men wrote about their adventure. (Messner, who always had an outsized ego, seems to have resented the fact that Habeler would write a book at all.) The media seized upon the conflict, and the two former best friends began
a feud that lasted a quarter century. To their credit, these two great mountaineers finally patched up their quarrel and even climbed together again.
After K2, Paul Petzoldt stayed on in India for several months. His initial intention was simply to sightsee, but he soon fell under the spell of a very odd duck named Dr. Johnson. The man was a retired physician from California who had come to India as a Baptist missionary, repudiated his faith, and set himself up as a guru of a mystical Buddhist cult. Petzoldt was so taken with Johnson (whose first name he could not later recall), that he arranged to have his wife, Patricia, join him at Johnson’s compound in the village of Dera Baba Jaimal Singh.
On January 25, 1939, gathering tensions within the Johnson household exploded. The only published versions of this bizarre event appear in the two biographies of Petzoldt, and they disagree in many details. Since the first biography,
On Top of the World
, was written by Patricia herself, who was present at the time, it may be suspect, because her agenda would have been to exonerate her husband of any wrongdoing. But even the more reliable account, in Raye Ringholz’s 1997
On Belay!
, depends entirely on Petzoldt’s own story of what happened.
In this telling, Johnson’s wife, who is portrayed as a depressive paranoiac, suddenly seized a shotgun and tried to shoot Petzoldt with it. Petzoldt grabbed the stock of the gun, struggled with her for several moments, wrenched the weapon out of her hands, and threw it out a window. In the melee, Dr. Johnson had hurried into the room. As Petzoldt fled into the courtyard, he accidentally knocked Johnson down. The guru’s head struck the stone floor and he was instantly killed.
(In the 1960s, in climbing circles, the scuttlebutt told an utterly different story. In this version, Petzoldt had ended up in a fistfight with a porter on some sort of trek and had killed him with a single blow to the head. Like most Wyoming cowboys, Petzoldt had honed his skills as a brawler and bar fighter. The climbing gossip had it that Petzoldt was allowed to leave India only after promising that he would never return to the country.)
In Ringholz’s account, Petzoldt and the other witnesses to the accident fabricated a bogus version of what had happened. Even so, Petzoldt was
charged with manslaughter and underwent a three-day trial before he was acquitted. By then, he was flat broke. The American consul took him under his wing and communicated with Charlie Houston, who was back in the United States. Houston shared the news with Bates and House. The four men scrounged up $550, which they wired to Calcutta. The money paid for both Petzoldts’ passage home by steamer.
Yet according to Ringholz, Petzoldt never realized that his teammates had come to his financial rescue. “I never knew that they sent the money there,” he told his biographer. “If they sent money to the consul, I never got it.”
After interviewing those former teammates, Ringholz wrote:
Unfortunately, the $550 has been the source of ill feeling among the members of the K2 expedition for almost sixty years. Houston, House, and Bates claim it was difficult for them to scrape up that amount of money in those days when they were young and not established. They expected, and contend that Petzoldt promised them, that on his return to the States the loan would be repaid.
Houston’s biographer Bernadette McDonald comes to a similar conclusion:
Back in the United States, Charlie received an urgent cable from the Consul General requesting money. Together with his father, he quietly made the necessary arrangements for Petzoldt to return. Charlie never completely forgave Petzoldt for not thanking his family for helping him out in this moment of need. Petzoldt claimed ignorance on the source of the money, but the friendship subsequently withered.
Whether or not this event caused the estrangement between Petzoldt and Houston, there seems to have been another source of lasting rancor between the men. Houston always felt that his team had done the very
best it could on K2. To have reached 26,000 feet on the first real attempt on the great mountain was more than anyone could have hoped for. But Petzoldt evidently thought the team could have done better.
A little-known fact about the 1938 expedition is that the members took along a movie camera, with which they shot footage not only on the approach to the Baltoro but all the way up to Camp III on the Abruzzi. In 2004, sixty-six years after the expedition, Houston had the best footage remastered and put on a DVD. A DVD disk was inserted in a plastic sleeve in each copy of McDonald’s
Brotherhood of the Rope
.
There’s some amazing footage from that expedition. For me, the most moving scene was shot as the climbers packed up their camps in a gathering storm to head down the mountain. The camera catches a tent flapping wildly in the wind, in front of which Bob Bates is grinning as he sings his head off—perhaps some Alaska sourdough ditty or one of the railroad ballads, such as “The Wreck of the Old 97,” that he had memorized and would sing at the drop of a hat for the rest of his life. There’s no sound track on the film, but in the voice-over that he supplied in 2004, Houston narrates:
We have done what we came to do. We have found a route to the summit cone, and we’re very happy and ready to go Home…. As the storm thickens, it’s clear that we must start for home as soon as the weather clears. In a few days it does clear, and we go on down to base camp, arriving there two days later, very excited, very happy. We have accomplished far more than most people expected we would. We have found a route up the mountain, and we enjoyed every minute of our success.
That formula summarizes Houston’s lasting feelings about the 1938 expedition. But Petzoldt’s lasting feelings were different—and less happy.
A friend of mine met Petzoldt in 1963, when he took a job as an assistant instructor at the Colorado Outward Bound School near Marble. Petzoldt, who was then fifty-five, was serving as one of the school’s senior guides. My friend, who was only twenty, was completely in awe of
the great man. But one day he got up the nerve to ask Petzoldt about reaching their high point on K2 in 1938. Petzoldt said simply, “I wanted to go on. Charlie decided to turn back.”
Asked the same question by Raye Ringholz for her 1997 biography, Petzoldt responded more vehemently. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “We weren’t turned back by bad weather. We made up our mind not to climb the mountain. If we’d have brought up a little bit more food and planned to get to the summit, we could have gone back as conquerors of K2!”
Well, that’s how memory works. In hindsight, it’s pretty hard to congratulate yourself for making the right decision and turning back. I know that’s been a key to my own success on the 8,000ers—turning around and coming back to fight another day, even when it means giving up the glory. There’s no doubt in my mind that in 1938, Houston and Petzoldt made the right decision. They reached the highest point they could, while still allowing the whole team to get safely down.
But the anguish of that “what might have been” seems to have gnawed away at Petzoldt for the rest of his life. For whatever reasons, he never went back to the Himalaya or the Karakoram. The final word—and the saddest—on the gulf between Petzoldt and Houston came at the Telluride mountain film festival in the late 1990s. Both men were on a panel celebrating K2. The chairperson was Rick Ridgeway, who in 1978 had been one of the first four Americans to climb K2. In
Brotherhood of the Rope
, Bernadette McDonald replayed the scene:
[Petzoldt] said that he had been opposed to the decision to go down, and that the decision had been taken because Charlie wasn’t feeling well. Ridgeway looked over at Charlie and raised his eyebrows. Charlie said nothing. He was hurt and angry, but he didn’t respond.
As far as I know, Petzoldt never claimed that if Houston hadn’t decided to turn around, the two of them (or Petzoldt solo) could have reached the
summit on July 21. Petzoldt’s declaration at the Telluride festival implies that he felt the team hadn’t built up enough supplies or pushed their deadlines hard enough to make a legitimate try for the summit. It’s just possible that he harbored a private fantasy that he could have gone for the top alone on July 21, as Hermann Buhl would do on Nanga Parbat in 1953. But it wouldn’t have been realistic.
Look at our own 1992 expedition. Vlad, who was a really strong climber, and who had the advantage of more than half a century of improvement in gear and knowledge of the mountain, left his camp on the Shoulder at 3:00
A.M.
with a strong partner. He didn’t reach the summit until 9:00
P.M.,
after eighteen straight hours of climbing. Then he had to bivouac on the way down.
Houston and Petzoldt didn’t reach the upper end of the Shoulder until 1:00
P.M.
on July 21. By that point they were already worn out from the climb from Camp VII. Even if Petzoldt had been strong enough to go all the way to the top, there’s no way he could have gotten there before nightfall. My God, in 1938 they didn’t even have headlamps—just flashlights they’d hold in one hand! And with the clothing they wore, I doubt that either Petzoldt or Houston could have survived a bivouac above 26,000 feet. And even if they had survived, they might have suffered debilitating frostbite.
In no sense should the 1938 expedition ever be regarded as a failure. It was, instead, a true breakthrough. When the summits of the fourteen 8,000ers were finally reached for the first time, between 1950 and 1964, only a single one—Annapurna—was climbed on the first attempt (and that at the cost of Herzog’s fingers and toes and Lachenal’s toes). K2 would finally be climbed only on the fourth attempt (or the sixth, if you count the 1902 and 1909 expeditions).
One of the things I admire about the 1938 expedition is that all the serious climbing was carried out by a team of only four, aided by three brave Sherpa, including the indomitable Pasang Kikuli. Whatever went on between them after the expedition, those four men became good friends on the mountain as they worked together with clockwork precision.
Their effort was a far cry from the kinds of huge militaristic expeditions countries would launch against the 8,000ers in the 1950s. I suppose that in a sense, Houston and his teammates carried an American banner to K2, but their expedition had nothing to do with nationalism. Ever since I first read
Five Miles High
, that 1938 team has served as a model for me of what a small group working in harmony can achieve on an 8,000er. By pioneering the route by which K2 would eventually be climbed, and by getting to 26,000 feet, they pulled off a magnificent achievement.