K2 (22 page)

On July 14, Wiessner led four men—Wolfe, Tse Tendrup, Pasang Kitar, and Pasang Lama—all the way up to 25,300 feet, where they established Camp VIII. The going was very hard, as Wiessner broke trail through knee-deep snow covered with an icy crust, but as usual, he stayed in the lead the whole day. At last the team had solved the Abruzzi Ridge and reached the lower edge of the Shoulder. Wiessner planned to place one more camp at the upper end of the Shoulder, at or above 26,000 feet, and go from there for the top. After so many stormy spells, the good weather was holding splendidly.

Thus the stage was set for one of the most astounding performances in the history of mountaineering—and for the all-but-inexplicable disaster into which it would evolve.

Sadly, Pasang Kikuli was no longer at the front. On the push to Camp VII on July 12, he had suffered a recurrence of the frostbite that had first afflicted him on Nanga Parbat five years earlier. That evening, he stayed in Camp VI with the exhausted Durrance.

Having reached the lower edge of the Shoulder and set up Camp VIII on July 14, Wiessner sent Tse Tendrup and Pasang Kitar back down to Camp VII, where the team had already stockpiled “eleven loads of supplies.” Staying at Camp VIII were Wiessner, Wolfe, and Pasang Lama—after Kikuli, the strongest Sherpa on the mountain. There followed two days of light snow as the men rested. Then the weather turned fine again. On July 17, the three men set out carrying a tent, their sleeping bags and air mattresses, and food and fuel for seven days. Their goal was to establish a last camp at the upper end of the Shoulder, then launch the summit bid from there.

The going was agonizing, thanks to two days’ worth of new, soft snow that had piled up on the Shoulder. As he led, Wiessner sank into the powdery stuff up to his hips. Only 250 feet out of camp, the trio approached a
bergschrund
—a crevasse where the rocky core of the mountain is separated from the glacial mass that lies on top of it. Here the slope steepened, and though the crevasse itself was crossable on a snow bridge, the texture of the snow grew even softer and less stable. The snow bridge covered a gap of only twenty vertical feet, but it would take all the strength and skill Wiessner had to tame it. He would write in 1956:

As Wolfe returned to Camp VIII, the other two men continued above, always with Wiessner breaking trail. Worn out from floundering in the deep snow, the pair pitched a temporary camp at 25,700 feet. The next day they pushed on. Wiessner had taken careful note of the “great ice cliff” that hangs over the Bottleneck couloir and the Shoulder, and he did not like the looks of it. On July 18, he and Pasang Lama crossed a field of scattered ice blocks—avalanche debris that had fallen from the cliff, the very same serac that would collapse in 2008. So Wiessner angled upward toward the left, leaving the Shoulder as he headed toward a band of rock cliffs, out of the line of fire of what I would later call the Motivator. By late that afternoon, the two men had pitched their tent on a solid snow platform, protected by the rock bands above. By Wiessner’s estimate, they were at 26,050 feet. The camp was even a little bit higher than our Camp IV in 1992. Wrote Wiessner later, “The view from this spot was inconceivably magnificent.”

By now, he was confident of success. On July 12, when Durrance had turned back to Camp VI, he and Wiessner had explicitly discussed their plans for the following days. There was no communications gap. As Wiessner later summarized the plan, “On July 14 Durrance was to attempt to climb to Camp VII with four Sherpas and if possible join us again higher up; in case he should not feel well he had only to send the Sherpas on up.” The agreement between Wiessner and Pasang Kikuli was equally clear. Since the best Sherpa could no longer hope to reach the summit, “his wish now was only to oversee the final support operations between Camps VI and VII.”

At Camp IX, 2,200 feet below the summit, Wiessner and Lama had six days of food and plenty of fuel. Beneath him on the mountain, Wiessner
assumed, was a continuous string of well-stocked camps, the logistical pyramid he had designed from the start.

But things had not gone quite as planned. Still suffering miserably from the altitude at Camp VI, Durrance had decided to go down on July 14. And for some reason, he took Pasang Kikuli with him, as well as the other three Sherpa who were supposed to make critical carries to stock up the camps above. In the end, Durrance and Kikuli descended past Camp IV and all the way down to Camp II. The only concession to Wiessner’s plan came at Camp IV, where Durrance dropped off two of the Sherpa with instructions to ferry loads higher during the following days.

Durrance’s diary fails to explain why he took Kikuli down with him. Kauffman and Putnam interpret the action as springing from concern over Kikuli’s frostbite. But if so, why take the other Sherpa down as well? Even in his demoralized condition, Durrance must have realized that his precipitous descent with four Sherpa was sabotaging Wiessner’s plan.

Why did Kikuli accede to Durrance’s request? Wiessner drily wrote years later, “He was unhappy not to be given this job as planned.” “This job” was to stay at Camp VI and superintend the ferrying of loads higher on the mountain. Even though Kikuli was vastly more experienced than Durrance, the latter was still a “sahib”—and Sherpa took orders from sahibs even when they disagreed with them. But the best explanation for Kikuli’s heading down is that Durrance was by now in such bad shape that the Sherpa may have doubted whether he could make the trip by himself. Kauffman and Putnam partially agree: “Dawa [Thondup] and Kikuli, the latter with what appeared to be serious frostbite of his toes, because of which he could not stay high, had almost carried [Durrance] down the 2200 feet from Camp IV.”

At Camp II, Durrance found, in Kauffman and Putnam’s words, “three beaten men surrounded by unwashed pots and pans filled with the remnants of a ‘horrible stew concoction.’ … Rather than touch it, Jack threw it all out.” One of the three was Tony Cromwell, the by now almost useless “deputy leader.”

At Camp IX, of course, Wiessner was unaware of this breakdown lower on the mountain. On July 19, he and Pasang Lama set out at 9:00
A.M.,
determined to get to the summit. By today’s standards, that’s pretty late, but in the 1920s and ‘30s, nobody realized that the traditional “Alpine start”—getting off in the wee hours to take advantage of every daylight minute and of the predictably better weather in the morning, a practice regularly observed in the Alps, the Tetons, and the Rockies—might also make sense in the Himalaya and the Karakoram. And given the primitive clothing of the day—sweaters instead of down jackets, wool knickers instead of down pants, single leather boots—an Alpine start on a peak like K2 probably seemed too cold to contemplate. On Everest in both 1922 and 1924, no climber ever got started from a high camp earlier than 6:30
A.M
.

Rather than traverse over to what would later be called the Bottleneck, menaced from above by that huge hanging serac, Wiessner at once tackled the rock cliffs. The amount of gear the two men carried puts our modern lightweight summit attempts to shame. Wiessner hefted a rucksack packed with pitons, carabiners, food, and extra clothing. Pasang Lama carried both men’s pairs of crampons as well as a sturdy “reserve rope,” three-eighths of an inch in diameter and an unimaginable 245 feet in length. The pair tied in with a 115-foot hemp rope that was a solid half inch in diameter—much thicker and heavier than any rope we would use today.

In light of what happened in August 2008, Wiessner’s avoidance of the Bottleneck looks like pretty canny mountaineering judgment. I suspect, though, that he was simply a lot more comfortable on rock than on snow and ice. As a teenager in Dresden, Wiessner had been part of a gang that put up what at the time were the hardest pure rock climbs in the world (though it would be decades before those men knew it). In the 1920s in the Alps, Wiessner’s two great first ascents, on the Fleischbank and the Furchetta, involved much more rock climbing than ice work. On the other hand, Mount Waddington, in British Columbia, of which Wiessner and Bill House made the first ascent in 1936, is a heavily
glaciated mountain, some of whose hardest pitches are on “mixed ground”—rock interspersed with ice.

Even so, Wiessner evidently underestimated the difficulty of those rock bands. No one since 1939 has ever climbed them again, so it is impossible to give them an objective rating of difficulty. For nine hours, Wiessner climbed the rock bands, hammering in pitons as he went. Lama belayed him on every pitch. In succession, Wiessner mastered a short couloir of black ice, a short overhang of iced-up rock, and many rope lengths of shattered, friable rock, much of it covered with a treacherous skin of ice called verglas. In the face of several unclimbable obstacles he backed off, traversing right or left to find the way. The climbing was so difficult that Wiessner often had to take off his mittens to seize holds bare-handed; but the air was so calm and the temperature warm enough that he didn’t risk frostbite.

Some of the pitches Wiessner later rated as sixth class—as hard as anything that had yet been done in the Alps. All this above 26,000 feet, without bottled oxygen! The climbing on those rock bands was harder by far than anything yet attempted on Everest, Kangchenjunga, or Nanga Parbat. It was harder by far than House’s Chimney or the Black Pyramid. It’s not easy to judge other people’s climbs, but I’d venture to say that nothing of comparable difficulty at such an altitude would be performed by anybody during the next nineteen years, until Walter Bonatti and Carlo Mauri’s brilliant first ascent of Gasherbrum IV in 1958.

At 6:30
P.M.,
with the sun nearing the horizon, Wiessner faced only an easy 25-foot traverse to the summit snowfield. He had reached 27,500 feet, only 750 feet below the summit. The snowfield promised relatively nontechnical climbing. K2 was in the bag.

But as he started to move on, Wiessner felt the rope come tight. He looked down. Pasang Lama smiled almost apologetically. “No, sahib, tomorrow,” he said. As a Buddhist lama, Pasang believed that evil spirits hovered about the summit of K2 at night.

For a few moments, Wiessner contemplated unroping and going for the top solo. None of the highest mountains in the world had ever been
climbed solo, let alone on a push through the night. But the weather was holding perfect, and a nearly full moon would illuminate the darkness.

Yet he could not abandon his partner. With a heavy heart, Wiessner turned back. He knew, however, that he and Lama had enough gear and food at Camp IX to make a second attempt the next day or the day after. As he had climbed the rock bands, Wiessner had studied the couloir and the ice cliff to the right. The Bottleneck (as it would later be named) now looked well within his capabilities, and the hanging serac seemed more stable than he had initially thought. On the next try, Wiessner would tackle that route, almost all of which was on snow and ice. It was bound to be easier than the 1,500 feet of mixed ground and rock cliffs he had so expertly solved on this first attempt.

Slowly, as night fell, the men rappeled down the complicated route, using pitons Wiessner pounded into the rock for anchors. “Many times during that descent,” he later wrote, “I regretted intensely that I had not insisted on continuing over that last traverse.”

Wiessner’s admirers over the years have argued that if anybody could have pushed on to the summit, reached it after dark, and descended by moonlight, it would have been he. But I disagree. If Wiessner had gone on with Pasang Lama, I think it could very well have turned into another Mallory and Irvine—two incredibly bold and determined climbers vanishing in the mists. If Wiessner had gone on alone, I don’t think he would have survived. And left alone on a small ledge at 27,500 feet, unable to descend on his own, Pasang Lama would surely have frozen to death. In turning back, Wiessner made the right decision. And in refusing to abandon his partner, he did the morally responsible thing. I admire him more for that than if he had reached the summit.

Even in the gathering night, the conditions were remarkably benign. It was windless, and at 27,000 feet Wiessner estimated the temperature to be between 23 and 27 degrees Fahrenheit. But the descent was difficult, requiring numerous rappels. (Although Wiessner never explained how the two men negotiated the terrain on the way down, I imagine that their very long “reserve rope” came in handy.) Pasang Lama was far less
experienced at this sort of thing than Wiessner, and both men must have been pretty tired. As the Sherpa rappelled down an overhang, the rope running across his back got snagged on the crampons he carried strapped to the outside of his pack. With a furious effort, Lama disentangled the rope, but in the process he dislodged both pairs of crampons. Wiessner watched in dismay as these precious pieces of footgear tumbled into the void. That fluke mishap would make a huge difference during the following days.