Authors: Ed Viesturs
K2 (44 page)
It was not until evening of August 11 that the two refugees completed their descent. The first person to greet Diemberger was Jim Curran, who of course hoped it would be Al Rouse emerging from the high death trap. According to Diemberger, Curran said, “You’re safe at last!”
“I’ve lost Julie,” he answered.
Later Curran wrote,
If you had lined up every member of each expedition and asked yourself who would survive an ordeal like this, Willi and Kurt would come at the bottom of most people’s lists. But in the end their slow, plodding, energy-conserving approach must have paid off.
Of the seven climbers who had headed for the summit on August 4, five had perished. The toll for the “dangerous summer” had reached thirteen.
To this day, in the long annals of mountaineering in the Himalaya and the Karakoram, only one season on any peak has ever been more deadly than K2 in 1986. In 1937 on Nanga Parbat, seven German climbers and nine high-altitude porters were crushed to death by a monstrous avalanche as they slept in their tents at Camp IV. That calamity, however, occurred in a single instant, as a result of a collapse of a hanging glacier far above—an act of God, as it were. In terms of a season punctuated by one unrelated disaster after another, snuffing out the lives of some of the world’s best mountaineers, K2 in 1986 remains unmatched.
The terrible summer had its impact in mountaineering circles in the United States, though it did not really reverberate among the general public. For one thing, “only” two of the thirteen victims were Americans. The hue and cry in this country about the Everest tragedy of 1996 had everything to do with how many of the principals involved, from Scott Fischer to Beck Weathers to Doug Hansen to Jon Krakauer, were Americans. And though K2 had an able chronicler in Jim Curran, the British writer did not play a pivotal role in the drama, as Krakauer did on Everest. Finally, on K2 there was no simple morality play to which the public could reduce the complicated chain of accidents—nothing like the perversely satisfying “they got what they deserved” formula so many readers took away from
Into Thin Air
.
A lead article in the
American Alpine Journal
by Charlie Houston, titled “Death in High Places,” tried to wring a moral lesson from the 1986 season. Among other criticisms, Houston wrote,
Too many of the deaths were avoidable….
Also commonplace were outrageous behavior, intense rivalry, and disregard of mountain ethics—which caused several deaths. Not many years ago some of the things that were done would have led to excommunication by the climbing fraternity.
Houston’s strictures were among the first in a vein that has now become commonplace, especially in response to the “circuses” on Everest every spring, as selfishness, competition, and dehumanization overwhelm compassion and brotherhood.
The most balanced and comprehensive coverage of the K2 tragedies in the American media came in an article in
Outside
magazine titled “The Dangerous Summer,” cowritten by Greg Child (four years before he would climb K2) and Jon Krakauer (ten years before he would climb
Everest). For the most part, Child and Krakauer avoided finger-pointing, but they ended the piece with a quote they had elicited from Jim Curran:
“If anything was common to most of the deaths, it was that a lot of people were very ambitious and had a lot to gain by climbing K2—and a lot to lose as well. Casarotto, the Austrians, Al Rouse, the Barrards were all—the word that comes to mind is overambitious. If you’re going to try alpine-style ascents of 8,000-meter peaks, you’ve got to leave yourself room to fail.”
Too many people on K2 last summer, it would appear, did not.
Twenty-two years later, commenting on the 2008 K2 catastrophe for
National Geographic Adventure
, Child would strike a more sardonic note: “What the hell—climbing is dangerous.”
In Great Britain and Europe, however, the K2 season caused a huge furor. The British press, including some of the climbing journals, raked the Austrians over the coals for “abandoning” Al Rouse. This charge was, of course, ridiculous: by August 10, Rouse was too feeble even to stand, and it was all Diemberger and Bauer could do to get themselves down the mountain. Likewise, British journals and newspapers castigated Diemberger for making a martyr of the supposedly reluctant Julie Tullis—despite all the evidence that their “endless knot” was very much a mutual passion.
Some of the French press went so far as to blame Michel Parmentier for abandoning Maurice and Liliane Barrard, even though he almost lost his own life by waiting for them as long as he did at Camp III. In the German-language press, Bauer and Diemberger, both of whom lost frostbitten digits to amputation, feuded bitterly, with the public taking one side or another. Even the Koreans were scapegoated for climbing too slowly, in too old-fashioned a style.
On the last page of
K2: Triumph and Tragedy
, Curran stepped back from all the accusations to editorialize:
Exploring and pushing the limits has always been the name of the game, whether in rock climbing, alpinism, or Himalayan mountaineering. But the disastrous summer of K2 must remain a salutary reminder that the limits are still there: pushing them is one thing, ignoring them another. Mountaineering will never be a safe activity and would not be worth doing if it were.
That last line is a credo by which all climbers live. When I look back on the summer of 1986 on K2, I can see all kinds of small mistakes that led to fatal outcomes. But the scenario that most haunts me is the picture of those seven climbers stranded at Camp IV waiting, day after day, when they must have known that their only hope of getting off K2 alive was to head down at once. It reminds me of a very wise saying about mountaineering that my wife, Paula, repeats often: “Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, you don’t.” No wonder the mantra that kept running through my head on K2 in 1992 was “Remember ‘86!”
In the summer of 1987, not one climber reached the top of K2. But a Japanese-Pakistani expedition pushing up the Abruzzi Ridge came upon Mrufka’s body between Camps II and III. She was frozen in place on a steep slope, her Sticht plate still clipped to a fixed rope, which was also wrapped around her wrist. In a remarkable operation, the team carried her body down to the foot of the Abruzzi Ridge and buried her there.
That summer, several Japanese and several Spaniards reached the Shoulder and climbed into the Bottleneck couloir before being turned back by bad weather. They found no trace of Alfred Imitzer, Hannes Wieser, Julie Tullis, or Alan Rouse. The two Austrians may have been avalanched off the ridge between August 1986 and July 1987. Tullis and Rouse were most likely entombed by the winter snows. As is true for so many victims of K2, the bodies of those four climbers have never been found.
Epilogue: The Holy GrailDespite the title of Jim Curran’s book about the 1986 season, in the story of K2, there’s more tragedy than triumph. The first ascents of other 8,000ers unfurled as glorious sagas of perseverance and daring—the French dashing up Annapurna in 1950 after wasting a month simply trying to find the mountain, Hermann Buhl going solo in 1953 to the top of Nanga Parbat, Hillary and Tenzing blithely solving the last obstacles on Everest the same year, Joe Brown and George Band stopping twenty feet short of the top of Kangchenjunga in 1955 out of respect for the beliefs of the people of Sikkim, for whom the mountain was a god and a protector. (Our team did the same on Kangchenjunga in 1989.)
But the first ascent of K2, in 1954, will forever be clouded by the bitter and interminable controversy it spawned. If you believe Walter Bonatti’s version of the events of July 30 and 31—and by now, most people in the climbing world do accept that version—the dominant character in the summit duo, Achille Compagnoni, must go down in history as one of the indelible bad guys of mountaineering. For fear of sharing the triumph with the younger, better climber, Compagnoni was apparently willing to let Bonatti and Amir Mahdi freeze to death in an open bivouac. And the premeditated ruse Compagnoni devised to prevent that sharing—hiding
Camp IX behind rocks above a dangerous traverse—turned the bravest Hunza climber of his day into a frostbite victim who would never be able to go back to the high mountains.
The heroes of K2—for me, the list is headed by Bonatti, Fritz Wiessner, and the whole 1953 American team—remain men lastingly scarred by defeat and, in the cases of Bonatti and Wiessner, by betrayal. Toward the end of Curran’s book, he tries to enumerate the triumphs of the 1986 season: Wanda Rutkiewicz becoming the first woman to climb K2, Benoît Chamoux’s dazzling twenty-three-hour ascent, the Poles claiming the Magic Line after it had turned back others—but those deeds are so far overshadowed by the thirteen deaths that 1986 will forever figure as a black season in the annals of mountaineering in the Karakoram.
Ever since Bob Bates and Charlie Houston wrote their classic narrative of the 1953 campaign, “the savage mountain” has become the sobriquet that has stuck to K2. John Barry and Jim Curran (in his historical survey) incorporated that label in the titles of their own K2 books. Last summer, the nickname recurrently appeared in the media accounts of the 2008 disaster.
It doesn’t work for me, though. K2 is not some malevolent being, lurking there above the Baltoro, waiting to get us. It’s just there. It’s indifferent. It’s an inanimate mountain made of rock, ice, and snow. The “savageness” is what we project onto it, as if we blame the peak for our own misadventures on it.
There’s no denying how dangerous a mountain K2 is, however. According to the website
EverestNews.com
, in 2008 alone at least 290 climbers reached the top of Mount Everest, while only 1 person died on the mountain. No fewer than 77 men and women topped out on a single day in late May. On K2 that summer, 18 climbers reached the summit, while 11 died trying. According to the most accurate count, by May 2009, 299 people have stood on top of K2, while 77 have died on its flanks. That’s a pretty daunting ratio—it means that for every 4 climbers who reach the summit, at least 1 dies. (The ratio for Everest is roughly 19 to 1.)
Those cold statistics mask a discrepancy that only further underscores the danger of K2. Every spring and fall, Everest now swarms with relative novices, the clients on guided expeditions who make up the bulk of the traffic. It’s not surprising that some of them should come to grief. K2, however, is still almost exclusively the province of experienced mountaineers, men and women who are used to extricating themselves from the most perilous predicaments.
It’s also true, though, that on Everest experienced “professional” climbers make mistakes and get in trouble. In the public eye, all clients get scapegoated as dilettantes who have no business being on the mountain. But many clients, including ones I’ve guided, have been training as amateur climbers for years before they sign up for Everest. In 1996, the clients got most of the blame for the tragedy. Shouldn’t the leaders have absorbed much of the criticism for mistakes that led to the disaster?
In 2004, the French climbing writer Charlie Buffet wrote a deft little book called
La Folie du K2
(K2 Madness). In it, he listed the ten French mountaineers who had reached the top of K2 to that date: Éric Escoffier, Daniel Lacroix, Benoît Chamoux, Maurice and Liliane Barrard, Michel Parmentier, Pierre Béghin, Christophe Profit, Chantal Mauduit, and Jean-Christophe Lafaille. That list reads like a Who’s Who of French mountaineering. Laconically, Buffet commented, “At this time, only two of them are still alive, Profit and Lafaille. All the rest died in the mountains.”
Since my great friend J.-C. Lafaille disappeared on Makalu in 2006, that reduces Buffet’s list of the living to one: Christophe Profit, who with Béghin made the first ascent of K2’s northwest ridge in 1991. And with the death of the Frenchman Hugues d’Aubarède in August 2008, Buffet’s roster becomes even more doleful.
Buffet closes his book with a powerful quotation from Lafaille. Since I don’t read French, I’d been unaware of J.-C.’s comments until this year, when a friend translated the passage for me. (In the book, it’s not clear whether J.-C., who got to the top of K2 in 2001, wrote the passage for a climbing magazine or simply spoke it during an interview with Buffet.)
It’s a superb, immense mountain that crushes you. Here the risks are palpable, you can see them. Not far from base camp, there’s this memorial [the Gilkey-Puchoz memorial]. You feel as though you’re in a cemetery. To reach the foot of the [Abruzzi] face, you walk along the Godwin Austen Glacier, where a Spanish friend of mine found the body of Maurice Barrard two years ago. It’s only a fifteen-minute walk from the tents where we lived for two months. And every time that I took that path, I found human debris there—clothes, shoes, a pelvis. The whole history of this mountain lies heavy on your shoulders.
K2 was the greatest adventure of my climbing life. It was the ultimate test of my mountaineering skills. It had everything: close calls, interminable waits during storms, retreats to base camp, desperate rescues of other climbers. I not only needed all my ability to get up the mountain, I needed all my patience. (Sometimes I call K2 the “full meal deal” of mountaineering—everything you could ask for in a climb, and more.) In all of my expeditions to 8,000ers, I’ve never spent so long on a peak before getting to the top. K2 was a lifetime of expeditions packed into one summer.
It was also one of the two or three most important turning points in my life. As I hiked out the Baltoro that August, I could finally say to myself,
I really do have the skills to get up the 8,000ers. I’ve climbed the three highest. What about the others?
Ultimately, K2 gave me the push and the confidence to conceive of my Endeavor 8000.
By 2008, I’d been on ten expeditions to Mount Everest. I’d reached its summit six times. Ever since 2005, when I finished the cycle of the fourteen 8,000ers by climbing Annapurna, I’d always entertained the thought that, given the right circumstances, I might give Everest another go.
Then, just last spring, the right circumstances fell into place. On
March 25, 2009, I set out once more for the world’s highest mountain, trekking up the Khumbu Valley for the seventh time on the way to base camp on the south side. Three months shy of my fiftieth birthday, I still felt as physically fit as I ever had.
The expedition was organized by the Eddie Bauer company. By now, I’m part of a team helping design a new line of technical gear, called First Ascent. Showcasing the products on Everest was to be the final stage of the company’s official launch of that line of products.
It was an honor for me to be part of the Eddie Bauer campaign. The primary draw for me in returning to Everest, however, was the challenge of trying to climb to 29,035 feet again. People often ask when I’m going to quit climbing. My response is “I’ll quit when I no longer enjoy it, or can’t do it anymore.”
Everest was as crowded as ever last spring. My biggest problem on the mountain, besides the usual spells of bad weather, was the traffic congestion up high on the South Col route. But I bided my time through late April and early May, and finally the weather forecast seemed favorable for a summit push. It’s always a bit of a gamble to leave base camp, with high camp still three days away, and to time it just right for a summit attempt. We had originally hoped to go for the top on May 17, thereby beating the crowds. But May 17 was a bust, with extremely high winds and near-zero visibility. So we waited in our tents on the South Col all day and night. And as we waited, many other climbers arrived. We knew the traffic would be heavy the next day.
Finally, at 11:00
P.M
. on May 18, four teammates and I left the South Col. It was not only pretty crowded on the route, but it was quite cold—somebody said minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Even so, we made good time, reaching the Balcony at 3:00
A.M.
, the summit at 8:00
A.M
.
By the time the sun rose, it was a nice day, slightly breezy but warm enough and gloriously clear. The descent was uneventful, and we got back to the South Col at 1:00
P.M
. As I wrote on my website, “So, 14-hour round trip. My seventh ascent of the mountain and more than likely my last ascent of the mountain. It was a great place to revisit, to come
back to Everest, but I don’t have the desire anymore to come back and climb the mountain for the eighth time.”
On Everest in spring 2009, I made a choice I’d never resorted to before, which was to use supplemental oxygen even though I had no client to guide. I explained the decision on my website: “Knowing that the next day would be rather cold and windy, as a safety issue I felt it would be better to stay with the team and use supplemental oxygen. So it was more based on safety, and sticking with my group. So I kind of compromised my ascent but it still worked out well.” It was gratifying later to learn that the people following our expedition online uniformly praised my decision, rather than needling me about compromising my purist style.
Climbing Everest again seemed reasonable. But there’s no way I’d ever try K2 again. Objectively, it’s not that severe a climb, at least on the Abruzzi Ridge. It’s gnarly, and it’s not easy to descend in bad conditions. It’s colder than Everest, because it’s situated a full eight degrees of latitude farther north, the equivalent of the distance between Charleston, South Carolina, and New York City. On Everest, every spring you can usually count on a stable window of clear weather, when the high jet-stream winds start to get pushed away by the approaching monsoon. But the monsoon doesn’t reach the Karakoram. Instead, you have to throw the dice with the weather. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get a single prolonged spell of good days all summer.
During the climbing campaigns of 1987, 1988, and 1989, no fewer than fifty-three climbers reached the summit of Mount Everest. In that same three-year period, although fifteen different expeditions, including some of the best mountaineers in the world, attacked K2, not a single person got to the summit. I’m not surprised.
Many climbers have made repeat ascents of Everest, including me with my seven. The record holder, Apa Sherpa, upped his own total of
Everest summits to nineteen in 2009. But as of May 2009, only three climbers have gotten to the top of K2 more than once, each of them making only a second ascent.
The ultimate barrier on K2, I think, is psychological. If you’ve been fortunate enough to hold the holy grail of mountaineering briefly in your hands, you don’t want to get greedy and try to take it home with you. If you do, as with Sir Gawain and Sir Lancelot in the Arthurian legend, only bad things will happen.
In recent years, there’s been gloomy talk about whether K2 will soon be “trivialized” the way Everest has been. The South Col route on Everest is now usually strung every spring with fixed ropes, in a continuous chain from advance base camp to the summit. That hasn’t happened yet on the Abruzzi Ridge on K2, but there’s no saying it couldn’t sometime soon. The expectations of last year’s climbers that the Bottleneck and the traverse at the top of it had to be strung with fixed ropes indicates a huge mental shift from the 1990s.
A few paying clients have gone on K2 expeditions in recent years. As far as I know, none has gotten to the summit. But the gloomy observers predict a future in which guide services will charge affluent wannabes big bucks to be hauled up the Abruzzi. If those outfits hire Sherpa or Hunzas to fix the ropes and pitch the camps, and if they routinely use supplemental oxygen, then K2 will move toward the situation Everest is now in. Fixed ropes are the linchpin for commercial guiding, for if a client only has to slide his jumar up one rope after another, rather than actually climb the rock and ice, a formidable challenge is reduced to a treadmill test of stamina. It’s inevitable, I think, that companies will try to commercialize K2, especially now that it’s becoming a “sexier” prize than Everest. And that will be a sad day for mountaineering.