Authors: Ed Viesturs
Recently, I reread my diary from the K2 trip. I was struck by how different
it seemed from the account I had written in
No Shortcuts
. Events and relationships that seemed really important when they were happening barely made it into the chapter I wrote thirteen years after the expedition. Conversely, some of the most dramatic turning points of my weeks on K2 got covered in my diary in only a few deadpan sentences. I wasn’t writing the diary, of course, for anybody else to read. At the time, I thought I was simply making a day-by-day record of the most ambitious mountaineering attempt of my life up to that point.
Now I wonder. Any “story” can be told in dozens of different ways. For that very reason, I believe, every time you go back and reexamine an important chapter in your life, you learn something new about it. And the reactions of audiences when I give slide shows, as well as the e-mails I received from folks who read
No Shortcuts to the Top
, gave me many new insights into my own experience.
I have always believed that climbing mountains teaches you lessons. And more than that, I firmly believe that those lessons can be applied to the rest of your life. It’s not an easy process, however. Mountaineering literature is full of trite clichés about “conquering an enemy” or “transcending your limits.” For at least two centuries, philosophers of the outdoors have insisted that nature is “a school of character.”
Would that it were all so simple! The most important lesson I learned from K2 was that by simply putting off making a decision, I made the worst decision of my life: to climb on into a gathering storm. I was lucky to survive our summit push on K2. Scott and Charley didn’t agree with me about this. That day, they never seemed to suffer from the nagging doubts—the knot in my gut, as I’ve always thought of it—I carried with me hour after hour. Yet my partners’ comparatively blithe attitude about our climbing on that August 16 doesn’t even begin to tempt me to revise my judgment. It’s ultimately a personal thing.
K2 is often called the hardest mountain in the world. It’s also often called the deadliest. This may not be strictly true: in terms of the ratio of climbers who get to the top compared to those who die on the mountain, Annapurna is more deadly than K2. (I succeeded on Annapurna, in
fact, only on my third try, in 2005, and only after I’d begun to wonder whether it was too dangerous a peak to justify another attempt. It became my nemesis—the last of all the fourteen 8,000ers I was able to climb.)
Even before I went to K2, however, I had started calling it “the holy grail of mountaineering.” It seemed to me to pose the ultimate challenge in high-altitude climbing. To prepare for that challenge, I read everything I could about K2’s history.
I’ve often puzzled over the fact that the public seems so fixated on Mount Everest. At one point in 1998, there were about ten books published in English by climbers who had been involved in the Everest disaster two years earlier—not just Krakauer’s
Into Thin Air
but memoirs by such survivors as Beck Weathers, Anatoli Boukreev, Lene Gammelgaard, and Matt Dickinson.
In the chaotic summer of 1986, thirteen climbers died on K2, including several who were among the finest alpinists in the world. That’s five more than died in the 1996 “killer storm” on Everest. Yet only one book chronicling the K2 disaster was published in the United Kingdom or the United States—Jim Curran’s
K2: Triumph and Tragedy
.
As I did my homework before our 1992 expedition, I couldn’t help comparing Everest’s history to K2’s. The highest mountain in the world has its dramatic stories: Mallory and Irvine disappearing into the clouds in 1924, Hillary and Tenzing’s smooth first ascent in 1953, Messner’s astonishing solo climb without bottled oxygen in 1980, and the like. But taken as a whole, the saga of Everest seems to me a sprawling, even tedious narrative, especially in recent years, now that guided commercial expeditions throng the mountain each spring and fall and as many as five hundred men and women per season claim their fifteen minutes each on the summit.
The history of K2, in contrast, pivots around a few intense and troubled campaigns, separated from each other by years of inactivity or total failure. As I first read about those campaigns, it struck me that each one had a lot to tell us about the most basic questions mountaineering
raises—the questions of risk, ambition, loyalty to one’s teammates, self-sacrifice, and the price of glory. As of 2009, moreover, K2 still has not developed anything like the guided-client scene on Everest. The world’s second-highest mountain is simply too difficult for beginners.
In focusing on the six most dramatic seasons in the mountain’s history—August 2008, 1938, 1939, 1953, 1954, and 1986—my aim is not just to tell the stories of those campaigns, not just to write chapters of a K2 history, but to muse and probe my way through those episodes as I attempt to glean their lessons. This book might in fact be called “Lessons Learned from K2.” Plenty of mistakes were made during those campaigns, leading to shocking tragedies. But it’s not my intention to sit back and second-guess my predecessors. Instead I want to imagine my way into their company, where I can ponder the what-might-have-been of their dilemmas.
Each of those six campaigns evolved into complicated human predicaments. Faced with adversity, the members of the 1938 and 1953 expeditions drew together, forging brotherhoods so deep that they lasted for decades thereafter. That kind of brotherhood is not only truly admirable but, I think, almost unique to mountaineering. The camaraderie born of shared adventures was one of the chief things that drew me to climbing in the first place.
Faced with other kinds of adversity, however, the 1939 and 1954 teams split into bitter factions, sparking personal animosities so intense that some of the men never spoke to each other again for the rest of their lives. During the 1986 and 2008 seasons, when many separate teams thronged K2 (unlike the single expeditions of ‘38, ‘39, ‘53, and ‘54), any semblance of order degenerated into a kind of every-man-for-himself anarchy.
In
chapter 2
, I retell my own story of K2, bringing in details and events I either neglected or forgot to mention in
No Shortcuts
. During the four years since I wrote that other book, I’ve reflected many times on what went right and what went wrong on K2 in 1992, and—not surprisingly—my take on that turning point in my life has shifted. By reorganizing my
own story in a more straightforward, chronological narrative, I hope to uncover stones I’ve never looked under before.
There’s all too much tragedy in K2’s history. But I hope this book serves as a hymn of praise to the great mountain. As well as being dubbed the hardest or the deadliest mountain in the world, K2 is often called the most beautiful. It still seems to me a holy grail—and I am neither the first nor the last of its many worshippers to travel to the ends of the earth for the chance to grasp it in my hands.
A sharp pyramid of black rock, sheer snow gullies and ridges, and ominous hanging glaciers, K2 has a symmetry and grace that make it the most striking of the fourteen 8,000ers. Rising from the Baltoro Glacier in the heart of the Karakoram, K2 is flanked by five other of the world’s seventeen highest peaks. That range, in fact, holds the densest constellation of skyscraping mountains anywhere in the world—even denser than the Himalaya around Everest. Yet K2 soars in proud isolation over Broad Peak, Gasherbrum I, Gasherbrum II, and its other formidable neighbors.
When you approach Mount Everest from the south, as do all teams that attempt the classic first-ascent route through the Khumbu Icefall and up to the South Col, the great mountain only gradually comes into view. Most of the way to base camp, Everest is effectively hidden behind the bulk of its satellite peak, 25,790-foot Nuptse. During the multiday trek into base camp, you get only sporadic peekaboo glimpses of its summit. As a result, for climbers the first sight of Everest seldom comes as a stunning, unforgettable moment.
It’s just the opposite with K2. As they march up the Baltoro Glacier, most climbers get their first view of the mountain from Concordia, where several glacial streams converge. All at once, after a week’s trek from the last village, Askole, K2 springs into sight. Even though it’s still a dozen miles away, the sheer, towering presence of the mountain overwhelms you.
Sir Francis Younghusband, the great Victorian explorer, was one of the first Westerners to see K2 from a distance, in 1887. The prospect moved him to an uncharacteristic effusion in his book about the expedition; he later recalled “saying emphatically to myself and to the universe at large: Oh yes! Oh yes! This really is splendid! How splendid! How splendid!”
Reinhold Messner, who climbed K2 in 1979, unabashedly called it “the most beautiful of all the high peaks.” He added: “An artist has made this mountain.”
In 1992, Scott and I got our first view of K2 not from Concordia but days earlier, when we hiked up a wooded hill out of our Paiju camp. All of a sudden, there the mountain was, sticking up into the sky, a perfect white pyramid. “Holy shit, that’s big!” said Scott, and I answered, “Wow, we’re almost there!” That evening, I wrote in my diary, “After breakfast, Scott and I scrambled up the ridges above camp and got some great views of K2. That is one huge mo-fo!”
By the beginning of the summer of 2008, some sixty climbers had assembled at base camp on the south side of K2. Several had tried the mountain before, but for most of the men and women on the Baltoro, it was their first go at K2. After their own first sightings of the magnificent mountain, some of their Internet dispatches had gushed with the same sense of wonder and astonishment that Scott and I had felt in 1992 and that Younghusband had expressed way back in 1887. Nearly all of the climbers were planning to try the Abruzzi Ridge or its variant spur, the Cesen route.
Too many days spent sitting out storms at base camp, however, had taken their toll on the various teams’ morale. By the end of July, more than a few of the climbers had chucked it in and left for home. Others hovered on a teeter-totter of indecision. A sixty-one-year-old Frenchman, Hugues d’Aubarède, decided on July 20 to give up his attempt. No sooner had he started packing his gear than several forecasts arrived predicting a coming spell of excellent weather. According to journalist Matthew Power, the Dutch leader of another team told d’Aubarède, “Just skip your work for another two or three weeks and then you can
summit K2.” Changing his mind, d’Aubarède called his wife in France to tell her he was going to give the mountain one more shot. It would be a fatal decision.
The window of clear, windless weather arrived at the very end of July. In the group of thirty who set out early on August 1 to go for the top, there were no superstars. Many of those climbers, however, had previous experience on the world’s highest mountains. A Norwegian couple, for instance, had climbed Everest together in 2005; they had also reached the north and the south poles the same year. The Dutch leader, who had made it to the top of Everest without bottled oxygen, was on his third expedition to K2. Besides Norway, Holland, and France, the mountaineers came from an assortment of countries, including Korea, Serbia, Singapore, Italy, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. There were also several Pakistanis and a number of Sherpa from Nepal.
Nearly all those climbers set out on August 1 from Camp IV, situated on a broad snow ridge known as the Shoulder, at about 26,000 feet. The Shoulder is the last place on the Abruzzi Ridge where you can reasonably pitch a tent. In 1992, Scott, Charley, and I placed our own Camp IV as far along the Shoulder as we could, just below where the snow slope steepens toward the start of the Bottleneck couloir. Last summer’s climbers, however, pitched their tents on the lower, southern end of the Shoulder. The difference may not seem like such a big deal, but we had good reasons for camping where we did. At altitude, in soft snow, it can easily take a full hour to trudge from one end of the Shoulder to the other. That’s an hour we saved over last summer’s climbers. That’s an extra hour added to their grueling summit day on the way up, and at least twenty minutes on the way down.
If there was one guy last summer who really had his act together, it was the Basque mountaineer Alberto Zerain, who started his own summit push from well below the Shoulder, leaving Camp III at 23,600 feet. Operating as a soloist without teammates, Zerain got moving by 10:00
P.M.
on July 31, and he climbed the 2,400 feet up to the Shoulder in the astonishing
time of only two hours. When he reached the other climbers’ Camp IV, he found them still struggling to get ready. According to Freddie Wilkinson, who covered the tragedy for the magazine
Rock and Ice
, “Zerain called out to the others still in their tents, trying to cajole them into hurrying up to leave with him. He received few responses…. After an hour of waiting, Zerain finally continued alone.”
I must admit that when I first saw photos from last summer, I was shocked. There those guys were, still crossing the Shoulder, and it’s already broad daylight! As I said, I’m generally not comfortable criticizing other climbers’ decisions. But that late start on summit day meant that the climbers had reduced what was already a small margin of safety by that much more.
It’s easy to succumb to high-altitude lassitude. You lose your motivation. It takes longer not only to do something but even to think about doing something.
It’s no fun getting off in the middle of the night from a high camp on an 8,000er. You’re in this closet-sized tent with your buddy. It’s dark, it’s cold, there’s ice everywhere. You have to brew up a drink—something warm, like a cup of tea. And that seemingly simple task alone can consume an hour of precious time. If your partner has to take a crap, you have to move aside and let him go out and do that. Then you have to put on your boots, your overboots, the rest of your clothes, and your harness. I always sleep with my boots in my sleeping bag, though not on my feet. Lots of climbers don’t. So in the morning they have to put on cold boots, which will instantly suck precious warmth from their feet, whose blood circulation is sorely taxed to begin with. That contributes to a bad start.