K2 (6 page)

After
No Shortcuts to the Top
was published in 2006, I got hundreds of letters and e-mails from readers. Very few of them were negative or critical, and many folks wrote to say that they were captivated or even inspired by my story. But the e-mail that probably moved me the most—the one that almost stunned me, it came so out of the blue—didn’t arrive until December 2008. That e-mail alone helped reaffirm for me that it was worth writing and talking about the risks and rewards of our glorious but dangerous pastime—that some good may yet come out of sharing with others what the mountains have taught me.

The e-mail was from Chris Klinke, the American on K2 in 2008 who, dismayed by the traffic jam on August 1, turned back. Klinke and I had never met, but he wrote:

DECISION

In 2007, after another controversial spring season on Mount Everest—record numbers reached the summit, but seven climbers died—I was asked by the
New York Times
to write an op-ed piece. The editor’s only half-articulated premise was
What can we do about this mess?
As we talked and e-mailed back and forth, I began to realize that what she really wanted from me was a rigid set of rules and restrictions that somehow could immediately be put into action. When I told her that I thought you couldn’t make rules about mountaineering, she quickly lost interest in my writing a piece.

All kinds of commentators shared the
Times
editor’s sentiments in the wake of 2008’s K2 disaster. There was also a widespread determination to pinpoint the supposed “villains” of the story. If we could only identify the cause of the tragedy, these armchair judges implied, we could fix it so it wouldn’t happen again.

I’m afraid I just don’t see things that way. About arriving on the summit as late as 7:00
P.M.,
for instance, I have no trouble saying that I’d never do that. But that doesn’t mean that I can tell other climbers what to do. In mountaineering, right and wrong aren’t black-and-white. For every “rule” you might try to apply to our pastime, you can come up with a classic example of some daring alpinist who flagrantly violated it, and in the process became a legend. In 1953 on Nanga Parbat, according to the wisdom of the day, the Austrian climber Hermann Buhl should never have gone for the summit alone. He should have turned around rather than reach the top as late as 7:00
P.M.
Above all, he should not have let himself get so strung out that he would have to bivouac on a ledge so tiny he couldn’t even sit down on it. But Buhl did all of the above, and although he lost toes to frostbite, by making the only first ascent of an 8,000er ever to be accomplished solo, he immortalized his deed as one of the boldest climbs ever performed in the Himalaya.

Suppose you did try to establish rules about climbing on Everest or K2. What committee would enforce them? What gatekeeper is going to stand at base camp and say, “Okay,
you
can head on up the mountain. Nope,
you
better turn around and go home.” Suppose the American Alpine Club tried to tell Nepal or Pakistan that they ought to limit the number of permits they give to expeditions every year or screen the applicants for competence. Forget it—those impoverished countries make serious amounts of money from expedition permits. Who are we to tell them how to run their business? In 2008, when the Chinese government cleared all other climbers off the north (Tibetan) side of Everest so that they could carry the Olympic torch over the summit, and even persuaded Nepal to make radical restrictions on the south side of the mountain, a lot of Western climbers got pretty pissed off. But the real victims were the Sherpa. By now, a significant portion of the whole Sherpa economy depends on the spring and fall seasons on Everest. A Sherpa who goes high to carry loads, fix ropes, and establish camps for American or German or Korean climbers can earn from a single expedition most of the yearly income that supports himself and his family. You didn’t read much about it in
the newspapers, amid all the coverage of protests in Paris and San Francisco and Lhasa, but thanks to Chinese arrogance, in 2008 a lot of Sherpa people were hit hard by the financial backlash.

As for disasters: we can’t stop the kind of catastrophe that played out on K2 in August 2008 from happening again. We shouldn’t even try.

Paradoxically, the glory of mountaineering has everything to do with this state of affairs. Climbing is about freedom. There’s no prize money; there are no gold medals. The mountains are all about going there to do what you want to do. That’s why I’ll never tell anyone else how to climb. All I can say is,
This is how I prefer to do it
.

These feelings, which are central to my philosophy of mountaineering, rose to the surface not only in the aftermath of 2008’s disaster on K2, but as that tragedy made me think all over again about my own expedition to the world’s second-highest mountain in 1992. Among all my thirty expeditions to the 8,000ers, I feel now, the K2 campaign was the one most marked by ecstatic highs alternating with abysmal lows. And it was also morally the most complicated.

That expedition was a roller-coaster ride of a learning experience for me, but I was young, ambitious, and hungry for any type of opportunity. That’s why I was willing to accept and suffer all the difficulties that were thrown into my path.

Scott Fischer and I would have preferred to go to K2 with a solid team made up of good friends. When I first heard that he was organizing an expedition, and I got up the nerve, in effect, to invite myself along, Scott had so many teammates lined up that all he could promise was to put me on the waiting list. But as the trip drew near, one by one the others dropped out, until the “team” consisted only of Scott and me. By then we were so broke that both of us doubted whether we could afford an expedition to K2.

That’s why we ended up buying slots on somebody else’s expedition.
We joined a Russian team led by Vladimir Balyberdin, or simply “Vlad,” as everybody called him. On paper, the deal looked like a reasonable quid pro quo: the Russians were eager to sell places on their permit in order to afford the expedition themselves, since what they lacked above all was hard currency. Vlad proved to be a strong climber (like me, he’d already gotten up Everest and Kangchenjunga), but he was a leader in name only. Almost from the start, there were tensions between the Russians and the rest of us who had bought places on the team. The word “team,” in fact, would be an oxymoron that summer.

It was only in 1975 that the Pakistani government caught on to the lucrative trick of selling multiple permits to K2 in a single season. That summer, instead of leasing the mountain only to Americans (as it had in 1953) or Italians (1954), the Ministry of Tourism granted simultaneous permits to teams from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, and Japan. “Throughout the summer,” writes K2 historian Jim Curran, “there was a more or less continuous procession of porters carrying supplies and equipment up the Baltoro Glacier. The result was chaos.

“Porter stages, load sizes, fees, rest days, etc., all became open to negotiation,” Curran elaborates, “and almost every expedition was dogged with strikes, go-slows, and thefts. Some expeditions even failed to reach Base Camp and a vast amount of ill-will was generated.”

By 1992, the authorities had worked out most of the logistical kinks. Porter strikes were not a problem on our approach to base camp. After the chaos of 1975, the Pakistani Ministry of Tourism had established fixed wages for the porters. Foreign climbers had to pay the standardized rates, and the porters had to accept them or go home. On the other hand, when I had to hire my own porters in Askole for the eight-day trek to base camp, I was so poor I could afford only three porters to carry my four loads, so I ended up humping my own sixty-pound pack all the way in.

Our so-called team was disorganized from the start. To save money themselves, the Russians had decided to drive overland all the way to Rawalpindi. They got there long after we Americans did. After cooling our heels for a frustrating week as we waited for the Russians, my teammate
Thor Kieser and I decided to snag a last-minute trekking permit and hike in by ourselves. Scott had already left Askole with his own trekking permit, escorting two paying clients to base camp in an effort to fill his nearly empty pockets. Along the way, Thor and I caught up with Scott and his trekkers. By the time we arrived at base camp on June 21, only a five-person Swiss team was on the mountain.

In retrospect, it’s obvious to me that from the very start, our expedition was plagued by stress and frustration. But I was so gung ho at the time that I ignored the distractions. After all our preparations, it was beyond my wildest dreams to be camped beneath the holy grail of mountaineering, and for weeks I floated along on a manic high of enthusiasm and hard work.

Not long ago, I let a friend read my K2 diary. He made an interesting observation. “Ed,” he said, “do you realize that the writing in your diary is far more blunt and critical than anything you write for publication, or anything you say when you give a slide show?”

No, I hadn’t realized. But when I recently reread my dairy, I saw that my friend was right. As I’ve said, the diary was for myself—I never expected that someday someone else would read it. So I’m sure I used those daily entries to vent my frustration. I tend to be nonconfrontational, so I guess that writing in my diary was a way for me to let off steam. I also believe that in certain tense situations, it’s often best to let it ride, rather than venting immediately, because hard feelings tend to smooth out with time and reflection. The question, though, is, which version is the truer account of what happened on K2—my diary or what I’ve written for publication?

There’s an old and honored tradition in exploration literature that you don’t air your dirty laundry in print. Whatever bickering, name-calling, grudge nursing, and dark funks really took place on the expedition, they’re nobody else’s business. You can read the whole of Sir John Hunt’s
The Ascent of Everest
and never suspect that a single cross word was exchanged by the climbers who supported Hillary and Tenzing’s monumental push to the summit. Maurice Herzog’s
Annapurna
—the bestselling mountaineering book of all time, and the book that more than any other inspired
me as a teenager and made me want to become a climber—characterizes the 1950 French team as an ideal brotherhood, with each member making heroic sacrifices to support the others and, in the end, even to save their lives.

When I learned, about a decade ago, that that wasn’t the whole story, that there had been plenty of conflict and resentment on the first ascent of Annapurna, I felt only slightly dismayed. By then I’d been on enough expeditions to see for myself how interpersonal conflicts and team dynamics play out. The new revelations about Annapurna didn’t change the feelings I’d had decades earlier, when I’d first read Herzog’s book. It still seemed a heroic tale of struggle, camaraderie, sacrifice, and eventual success.

With the counterculture revolution of the late 1960s and the 1970s came a new trend in expedition literature. In the new narratives, the dirty laundry was not only brought out of the closet, it was put on prominent display. No two books more vividly embodied this tell-it-like-it-was aesthetic than Galen Rowell’s
In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods
and Rick Ridgeway’s
The Last Step
, which chronicled, respectively, the 1975 and 1978 American K2 expeditions. Rowell and Ridgeway not only highlighted every interpersonal showdown among their teammates, they remembered (or recreated) blistering dialogues to dramatize them. A sample from Ridgeway: