K2 (38 page)

Marshall contributed several key new insights to the muddled affair. Analyzing the rate of climb of the summit pair, and taking at face value their claim to have started upward on July 31 at 6:15 in the morning, he calculated that through nine and a half hours of climbing with gas, Lacedelli and Compagnoni would have averaged 168 vertical feet per hour. Then, from 26,700 feet to the summit, suddenly bereft of oxygen but carrying the weight of the useless bottles, they miraculously increased their pace to 320 feet per hour. This goes against everything other climbers have reported about progress at such altitudes with and without supplementary oxygen—just as it goes against my own experience. The higher you go, especially without supplemental oxygen, the slower you go. There’s simply not enough oxygen to feed your muscles, so each step becomes more difficult than the previous one.

Even more damningly, Marshall stumbled upon a pair of summit photos published in 1955 in the Swiss anthology
The Mountain World
, although not in
Ascent of K2
. One shows Compagnoni with his oxygen mask still on his face. The other is of Lacedelli, maskless, but with exactly the sort of ring of congealed ice on his mustache and beard that would have formed around a mask he had just removed. This discovery demonstrated almost beyond a doubt that the story of running out of oxygen was a lie.

In 2003, an American writer questioned Lacedelli about these discrepancies. “We were using German-made Dräger bottles,” the Cortina guide answered. “We didn’t know how to regulate them properly. We had too much oxygen—it burned our throats, and we bled from the mouth. That’s why we ran out.” This did not speak to Marshall’s point about the
faster pace the two men would have had to manage after running out of oxygen.

Lacedelli also offered a new explanation for why they didn’t chuck the apparatus to lighten their loads: “I couldn’t take the bottles off because my fingers were frozen.” I don’t buy that reasoning, either. It’s the simplest thing in the world to take off the oxygen crate.

Asked about the seemingly incriminating summit photos published in
The Mountain World
, Lacedelli answered, “Compagnoni put his mask on for just five minutes, to warm his breathing. I just put up my hand. I didn’t want cold air in my throat.” That, too, doesn’t make sense. If you put a mask on your face when you’re not getting oxygen through it, it’s like breathing into a plastic bag. If you did it for five minutes, you’d probably pass out.

The American writer further probed Lacedelli about the strange cry at dusk, “Leave the masks!” In the original Italian edition of Desio’s book, the key phrase is
“Lascia i respiratori!”
Strictly speaking, “respirator” refers to the whole apparatus, gas mask and regulator included. Had Lacedelli meant the bottles alone, he would have cried,
“Lascia le bombole!”

“What did you say when you called out to Bonatti at dusk?” the writer asked.

“Lascia le bombole!”
Lacedelli answered guilessly. “Leave the bottles! Go down to Camp VIII!”

“Lascia i respiratori!,”
then, must have been Compagnoni’s deliberate lie in 1954, as he was already planting the charge he would make through Nino Giglio ten years later, accusing Bonatti of siphoning off the precious gas in his bivouac.

At his worst, Ardito Desio emerges from the story of K2 in 1954 as a pompous dictator, a self-important and somewhat mad scientist, even a semicomic figure. If there’s a villain in the story, I’m afraid it would have to be Achille Compagnoni.

At the end of his interview with the American writer in 2003, Lacedelli sounded a wistful note. “For a long time after the expedition,” he said, “I
was friendly with Bonatti. Then we stopped writing and telephoning. I haven’t seen him in 25 years.”

Lacedelli sighed. “This was not war. Millions of people fight wars, and then shake hands afterwards. I hope one day to shake hands with Bonatti.”

When all is said and done, what lingers about the first ascent of K2 is the feeling of just how sad a story it is. What should have been a great collective triumph ended up in backstabbing and endless controversy. The British team on Everest the year before had made its first ascent as a harmonious team. Decades later, the members of that expedition were still getting together in North Wales for reunions where they did a little climbing and a lot of nostalgic reminiscing.

Needless to say, the Italian K2 team never had a reunion. Instead, some of its members ended up suing each other. (Desio even went so far as to sue his own cinematographer, Marió Fantin, claiming that he’d withheld several reels of 16-millimeter film.) And in January 1955, all the team members except Compagnoni and one other climber signed a letter of protest against Desio’s book, claiming it was full of distortions and outright lies. The first ascent of K2 may have been embraced by the Italian public as a great national triumph, but for the climbers, the victory was bittersweet at best.

Back in the States, Bob Bates and Charlie Houston learned of the Italian triumph on K2. Bates took the news philosophically. But for Houston, the ascent was deeply disturbing. He had already been granted a permit for a 1955 expedition, and, as he later recalled, “I thought that the third time we
must
succeed.”

Within a day after learning of the Italian success, Houston (in the words of his biographer Bernadette McDonald) “wandered into the local hospital in Nashua, forty miles from [his home in] Exeter, with no idea of who or where he was and with absolutely no identification on him.” Diagnosed with global amnesia, Houston was admitted to a hospital. A
psychiatrist friend who visited him found him “weeping inconsolably,” with his short-term memory gone. The shock of the news about K2’s first ascent had apparently sent Houston over the edge.

He was soon restored to his wife and home, but it took him several weeks to recover. That autumn, Charlie Houston quit climbing for good.

THE DANGEROUS SUMMER

The second ascent of Mount Everest came in 1956, only three years after Hillary and Tenzing, when a Swiss party climbed the highest peak in the world and made the first ascent of neighboring Lhotse, the fourth-highest. The second ascent of K2 came only in 1977, twenty-three years after Lacedelli and Compagnoni. If anything, that second ascent represented logistical overkill far exceeding even Desio’s 1954 extravaganza. The team of Japanese in 1977 had no fewer than fifty-three members and 1,500 porters! The climbers ascended via the Abruzzi Ridge and, like the Italians, used bottled oxygen up high. In early August, seven members reached the summit. One positive note was that for the first time a native Pakistani, the Hunza Ashraf Aman, also topped out.

The Japanese expedition, however, was viewed by mountaineers around the world as a throwback. Jim Curran writes in
K2: The Story of the Savage Mountain
,

This, then, was the long-awaited second ascent of K2: a total anticlimax.

If it proved anything it was that with enough money and manpower success was almost guaranteed…. Even in 1977, the expedition was seen as a dinosaur, totally out of step with the current thinking epitomised by Messner and Habeler two years earlier [on their landmark alpine-style ascent of Gasherbrum I by a new route].

The allure of Everest diminished almost not at all after its first ascent. Between 1954 and 1975, no fewer than seventeen expeditions attacked the mountain, their nationalities ranging from Indian to Argentine to Spanish to American to Japanese to Chinese. During that same twenty-two-year period, not a single major expedition ventured onto K2.

The main reason for that neglect was that, thanks to political turmoil, Pakistan closed the Karakoram to climbing from 1961 through 1974. But the intrinsic difficulty of the mountain also loomed as a prohibitive factor.

With the reopening of the Karakoram, Americans renewed their pursuit of K2, sending powerful parties in 1975 and 1978. The first attempt, which tackled the complex northwest ridge, was thwarted by route-finding problems and hideous internal dissension. It was this expedition that Galen Rowell chronicled in his tell-all book
In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods
. The 1978 team was likewise torn with dissension, but finally placed four Americans on top. Jim Wickwire, John Roskelley, Lou Reichardt, and Rick Ridgeway—superb mountaineers, all four—made the third ascent of K2 via the long and intricate northeast ridge, which had been attempted before but never completed. (For the top 2,000 feet, the Americans’ route coincided with the Abruzzi route.) Three of the four reached the summit without supplementary oxygen.

Though they’re a bit older than I am, Wickwire and Roskelley became good friends of mine. Both of them were on the 1989 Kangchenjunga expedition with me, although they left the team early without reaching the summit—Jim because he developed a bad case of pneumonia, John
essentially because he got fed up with the way the expedition was being run. Ridgeway’s memoir about the 1978 expedition,
The Last Step
, also a tell-all inside account, was one of the books I devoured before I went to K2 in 1992. The sordid details of the team’s interpersonal conflicts that Ridgeway captured are not the sort of thing I’d commit to print myself, but I found them fascinating all the same.

During the first years after the embargo ended, Pakistan limited the expeditions on K2 to one a year. The Ministry of Tourism, however, couldn’t help noticing what the Nepalese were doing with Everest, granting permits to multiple expeditions within a single year. Since that’s such an obvious moneymaker for the government, it’s a wonder the Pakistanis didn’t start the practice sooner.

By the early 1980s, K2 was “hot” in mountaineering circles. Four expeditions focused on the mountain in 1982, four again the following year, and four in 1985. In 1986, Pakistan at last opened the floodgates. That year, no fewer than eleven separate parties would congregate on the slopes of K2.

Meanwhile, in the years from 1978 through 1985, the mountain witnessed six more fatalities. There was Nick Estcourt from the British team in 1978, buried by an avalanche. The next year, two Pakistanis died, one of a heart attack, one by falling into a crevasse. In 1982, a Pole also died of a heart attack, and a Japanese climber fell on the descent after reaching the summit by a new route, the north ridge. And in 1985, a Frenchman died on the descent of the Abruzzi Ridge.

By the end of 1985, then, thirty-nine men (but no women) had reached the summit of K2, while twelve had died trying. With the summer of 1986, that ratio would become much worse.

There were two American teams on K2 that year. One of the ironies in my life that I’ll never stop thinking about is that I was invited on one of those two expeditions, before I’d ever been anywhere in the Himalaya
or the Karakoram. In 1986 I was twenty-six years old, in my fourth year of guiding during summers at Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. (RMI), but during the school year I was getting my doctorate in veterinary medicine at Washington State University. One of my RMI colleagues was a guy named John Smolich who’d been to Everest in 1984. John was a phenomenally strong climber, but he came across as soft-spoken and gentle. I really respected him.

John was the leader of an eight-man team from the Pacific Northwest. They were superambitious: instead of the classic Abruzzi Ridge, they were aiming at the beautiful, unclimbed route on the south face that Reinhold Messner had called the “Magic Line.” Sometime that winter, John invited me to join the team. Andy Politz, another RMI guide, was also on board. He was an even closer buddy, the guy I’d bailed off Rainier with in a winter storm, when I survived the only unplanned bivouac of my life. Andy and I had also invented our “load wars”—an ongoing competition to see who could carry the most groceries to Camp Muir while guiding clients. And in 1983, Andy and I had served as junior guides under Phil Ershler on an RMI-led ascent of Denali—my first expedition ever.

I was deeply flattered to be invited to K2, and sorely tempted. There was no way, however, that I could skip out of my summer externship at Washington State. With great regret, I turned down the invitation.

The Americans had been at base camp for only three weeks when, on June 21, Smolich and teammate Alan Pennington started up the approach gully at the base of the Magic Line. Almost immediately, at 5:30 in the morning, they heard a loud roar. Morning sun striking the face had dislodged a huge boulder thousands of feet above. (That boulder had been considered so stable that on a previous foray up to Camp II, some of the team members had anchored a fixed rope to it.) The boulder started careening down the route. When it hit the top of the approach gully, it triggered a 15-foot fracture line that set loose a massive avalanche. Smolich and Pennington tried to run for it, but they didn’t have a chance, and they were engulfed in tons of snow and ice debris.

Their teammates dug out Pennington, but it was too late to save his life. John’s body was never found. After burying Pennington near the Gilkey-Puchoz memorial, the rest of the team abandoned the expedition and headed home.