Authors: Ed Viesturs
The two men reached Camp IX at 2:30
A.M.
They had been going for almost eighteen hours straight. To have descended 1,500 feet of difficult ground in the dark without an accident was an extraordinary achievement in its own right.
Wiessner and Lama slept late and took a rest day on July 20. The two men were mildly disappointed that none of the support party had arrived at Camp IX, but Wiessner did not yet suspect any serious disruption of his logistical pyramid. It was so warm in camp that for hours, Wiessner lay naked on top of his sleeping bag, taking what he quaintly called a “sun bath.” Unfazed by his setback on July 19, he was eager to make a second attempt the following day. In his 1956 account, Wiessner implied that Lama was equally psyched: “At three o’clock we felt fresh again, so that we decided to go to the summit the next day by the easterly route. I had no doubt of our success.” But only two paragraphs later he confessed, “Since the day before [Pasang Lama] had no longer been his old self; he had been living in great fear of the evil spirits, constantly murmuring prayers, and had lost his appetite.”
On July 21, the two men got off at 6:00
A.M.,
a much better start than they had managed two days earlier. Nowadays nearly everyone pitches a Camp IV somewhere directly on the Shoulder. From there the approach to the Bottleneck is a straightforward matter of climbing up the gradually steepening slope. From Wiessner’s Camp IX, however, a tricky right-ward traverse across the base of the rock bands was the first order of business. If a pair of men are climbing straight up, the leader can safely belay the second simply by taking in the rope. On a traverse, belaying is
a much more delicate task. If Lama, coming second, had fallen off, he would have taken a wicked pendulum before the rope came tight to Wiessner. So, as he led, Wiessner had to place pitons at the more difficult moves simply to shorten the length of a potential fall for Pasang Lama. The traverse took a long time, and Wiessner described it in his diary as “disagreeable,” “difficult,” and “treacherous.”
It was still morning, however, when the two men reached the bottom of the Bottleneck. The snow here was so hard-crusted that Wiessner could not kick steps in it. All at once the significance of the loss of the crampons came home to him. As he later wrote, “With crampons, we could have practically run up [the couloir], but as it was we would have had to cut 300 or 400 steps. At these heights that would have taken more than a day.” Recognizing the futility of the task, Wiessner and the loyal Sherpa turned back to Camp IX once more.
When they arrived at the tent to find that still no teammates had come up, Wiessner began at last to suspect that something had gone wrong. Even so, he felt that there was still a good chance of climbing K2. Among the supplies being ferried up the mountain were spare pairs of crampons. And the weather was holding perfect.
On July 22, the two men headed down to Camp VIII. Wiessner’s plan was to pick up more food and gas and the all-important extra crampons, then return to Camp IX. If no crampons had arrived, Wiessner reasoned, he could borrow Wolfe’s to lead the hard pitches up high, then drag his partner up on a tight rope.
Pasang Lama had had enough of the climb, however, and begged to be replaced in the summit team by someone else. Wiessner thought that Wolfe ought to be equal to the task, or perhaps even Jack Durrance, if he had at last overcome his altitude problems. Weissner was so certain of his return to Camp IX that he left his sleeping bag there, while Lama carried his own down. Here the wisdom of Wiessner’s logistical scheme seemed to pay its dividends in flexibility. On most Himalayan expeditions to that date, each climber had carried his own single sleeping bag up and down the mountain. But by insisting on stocking each camp with sleeping bags,
Wiessner made it possible, in theory, for the men to shuttle between camps at will with only light loads.
On the steeper slopes above Camp VIII, the loss of the crampons again exacted its toll, for here Pasang Lama took a fall. Wiessner described the accident in 1984:
Pasang was behind me. I should have had him in front, but then I would have had to explain to him how to cut steps. I had just got my axe ready to make a few scrapes, when suddenly he fell off. I noticed immediately, because he made a funny little noise. I put myself in position, dug in as much as possible, and held him on the rope. If I hadn’t been in good shape, hadn’t climbed all those 4000-meter peaks in the Alps, I wouldn’t have had the technique to hold him.
This account makes Wiessner’s belay sound almost routine, but it was a remarkable feat. Even though they were roped close together, Lama fell, out of control, down to his partner’s level and an equal distance beyond before the rope came tight with a sudden jolt. Many pairs of climbers the world over have been swept to their deaths in just such an accident.
Arriving at Camp VIII, Wiessner received a bad shock: no one had come up from below. Only Dudley Wolfe was there. The man was overjoyed to see Wiessner but was furious at his laggard teammates lower on the mountain. “Those bastards haven’t come yet,” he said. Wolfe had run out of matches two days before, and the only water he had drunk was a small pool of snowmelt that he had gathered on a fold of the tent.
“I cannot understand,” Wiessner wrote in his diary, “why our Sherpas, [who] had definitely promised to stock up Camp VIII, had not come. I also wondered where was Jack.”
Despite a growing sense of alarm, Wiessner was still optimistic. Camp VII, a mere 600 feet lower, had been bountifully stocked even before the team of five had pushed on to establish Camp VIII on July 14. Surely at
Camp VII the men could pick up food and fuel and spare crampons, then head back to Camp IX for yet another summit bid.
After cooking a hot lunch and “celebrat[ing] our reunion,” as Wiessner later put it, the three men headed down. Wolfe carried his sleeping bag with him, as did Pasang Lama. For the first time in days, a light fog had crept in. At first, the trio roped up, with Lama going first, Wolfe in the middle, and Wiessner taking up the rear. On a descent of moderate terrain, it was standard practice for the most experienced man to come last, so that he could belay a partner who might slip. But in the fog, Lama kept losing his way, veering too far to the east. (This was exactly what Scott had tended to do as he led our three-man rope down from the summit in 1992.) So Wiessner switched the order, putting himself in the lead and Lama in the rear.
It was here that Wolfe’s clumsiness nearly cost all three men their lives. As Wiessner paused in a precarious position, leaning forward to chop a step below his feet, Wolfe accidentally stepped on the rope. The sudden jerk pulled Wiessner off his stance, and he started sliding down the steep slope.
In 1984, Wiessner gave a vivid account of this near catastrophe:
I immediately called back, “Check me! Check me!” Nothing happened. Then the rope came tight to Dudley, and he was pulled off. The rope tightened to Pasang behind, and he too came off. We were all three sliding down, and I got going very fast and somersaulted.
I had no fear. All I was thinking was, how stupid this has to happen like this. Here we are, we can still do the mountain, and we have to lose out in this silly way and get killed forever….
But getting pulled around by the somersault and being first on the rope, it gave me a little time. I still had my ice axe—I always keep a sling around my wrist—and just in that moment the snow got a little softer. I had my axe ready and worked very hard with it. With my left hand I got hold of the rope, and eventually
I got a stance, kicked in quickly, and leaned against the axe. Then, bang! A fantastic pull came. I was holding it well, but it tore me down. But at that time I was a fantastically strong man—if I had a third of it today I would be very happy. I stood there and I wanted to stop that thing. I must have done everything right, and the luck was there, too.
In the K2 annals—or, for that matter in the history of climbing in the Himalaya or the Karakoram—only Pete Schoening’s “miracle belay” in 1953 is more legendary than Wiessner’s self-arrest, which saved himself and his two teammates. I’d managed a similar self-arrest in 1992, after Scott got avalanched off and pulled me with him. That was tough enough, but there were only two of us on the rope, not three. And as big as he was, Scott was not as heavy as Dudley Wolfe.
As they approached Camp VII, the shaken men called down to the comrades they presumed were there, but they got no answer. It was dark by the time they arrived. And here the shock became incomprehensible.
Not only were there no teammates installed in Camp VII; the tents sagged, with their doors open. One was full of snow, the other half-collapsed. All the sleeping bags and air mattresses were gone. What was left of the food had been scattered wantonly in the snow outside the tents. It was as if the camp had been attacked by vandals. Wrote Wiessner in his diary, “What had been going on during the days when we were high—sabotage? We could not understand.”
Stunned and exhausted, the men cleaned out one tent, repitched it, and crawled inside. In the fall coming down from Camp VIII, Wolfe had lost his sleeping bag. That night the three men shared Pasang Lama’s single bag and air mattress. They endured a sleepless vigil that, as Wiessner wrote seventeen years later, “we shall never forget.”
It is a testament to Wiessner’s indomitable spirit that even after that wretched night, he still planned to go back up the mountain and make a third summit attempt. Surely there would be food and sleeping bags at Camp VI, and Wiessner calculated that there should be at least six Sherpa there as well. In the morning Pasang Lama and Wiessner got
ready to go. Wolfe had decided to stay at Camp VII. Wiessner later explained the trio’s rationale:
With only one sleeping-bag we could not stay here in Camp VII, so we decided to go to Camp VI and fetch sleeping-bags from there. One of us, to be sure, could remain up here with Pasang’s sleeping-bag, get a rest, and so spare himself the trip down and up. Wolfe suggested that he stay, to recover from the unpleasant night and be in better shape to take a load to Camp VIII the day after tomorrow. As leader of the expedition I, myself, had to go down to Camp VI to get the support operations going again and find the explanation of the unheard-of occurrences. Pasang was to be relieved.
Later, Wiessner’s harshest critics would accuse him of abandoning Dudley Wolfe. Even Kauffman and Putnam, looking back from their vantage point of fifty-three years of hindsight, castigate Wiessner on this question:
The decision now made was to be the major cause of the ensuing tragedy. Fritz split his small party….
A cardinal rule of mountaineering, observed, certainly until recent years, is that under no circumstances does one split a small party if one has any reason to suspect trouble ahead….
Surely this was a time when three ambulatory men should have stuck together rather than separate. Indeed, if by some miracle, all was well below, say at Camp VI, three backs were surely better than two or one to help haul up fresh supplies….
Was this the decision of a leader fully in command of his faculties?
I don’t know where Kauffman and Putnam got their “cardinal rules of mountaineering,” but this analysis, like their theory that the expedition leader should not be the same person as the “point man,” seems cockeyed.
If Wolfe was too tired to push farther down the mountain on July 23, what was Wiessner supposed to do? Sit and wait at Camp VII—three men with a single sleeping bag and air mattress—for help that would never come? Order Wolfe to descend, no matter how wiped out he was? Far from abandoning his teammate, Wiessner tried to spare him a further ordeal. It did not seem possible that Camp VI could have been destroyed as Camp VII had been. To me, what Wiessner did seems perfectly logical.
Wiessner and Lama did not depart until 11:00
A.M.
on the July 23. And 700 feet lower, the inconceivable became reality. Not only were there no Sherpa in Camp VI, but the two tents had been taken down and folded up. Some gasoline and a little bit of food were cached there, but the sleeping bags and air mattresses were gone.
“Our situation now became very serious,” Wiessner later wrote. The two men had no choice but to continue the descent. At Camps V and IV, still no sleeping bags. The Camp III depot was empty. At nightfall, Wiessner and Lama reached Camp II, which ought to have been the best-provisioned on the mountain. No sleeping bags! Utterly worn out, the two men took down one tent and wrapped themselves up in it while they tried to sleep in the other. Their fingers and toes got frost-nipped, and for the second night in a row, they got no sleep.
In the morning, Wiessner and Pasang Lama staggered down the lower slopes of the Abruzzi Ridge and at last emerged on the Godwin Austen Glacier. Base camp was still several miles away. Wiessner later wrote, “For the last kilometers on the nearly level glacier we could only just drag ourselves along, and often we fell to the ground.” Finally, with base camp almost in sight, they saw four tiny figures in the distance—teammates at last. Slowly the gap between those figures and the two utterly spent climbers closed.
This is the great mystery. Why were the tents stripped? While Wiessner, Pasang Lama, and Dudley Wolfe were pushing hard for the summit, what
was going on below Camp VIII? What had happened to the other four Americans, and to the rest of the Sherpa?
As the figures on the glacier drew near, Wiessner recognized Tony Cromwell and three Sherpa. The first thing Cromwell said was “Thank God you’re alive!”
By now, with his throat desperately sore from breathing thin, cold air, Wiessner had lost his voice, a condition that would last for weeks. But in a rasping whisper, he summoned up his fury: “What is the idea?”
Wiessner later recalled his deputy leader’s explanation: “He told us they had given us up for dead. He was just out looking for any sign of anything on the glacier. I said, ‘This is really an outrage. Wolfe will sue you for your neglect.’”
In silence, the six men plodded the short distance to base camp. According to Wiessner,