The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2

by Jennifer Jordan

  ON MARCH 14, 1927, just shy of his ninety-seventh birthday, the family patriarch, B. F. Smith, finally died. Although he had loved him, Dudley nonetheless felt a new freedom after his commanding grandfather was gone. While he had lost a source of emotional support, he had also lost his most critical judge, the witness to his every failure.

  Although Dudley realized he wouldn’t meet his graduation requirements by June 1929, he knew he would earn his bachelor’s degree the following year—the first diploma of his life. Perhaps as a reward, he commissioned a double-masted, sixty-foot schooner from his sailing friend John G. Alden of Boston, who modeled his boats on the Grand Banks fishing vessels: heavy, sturdy, and strong enough to withstand gales. Soon after the yacht’s completion in Wiscasset, Maine, Dudley christened it the Mohawk at the Camden Yacht Club, just up the road from Rockport. As he walked through the venerable but rustic one-room clubhouse after the ceremony, he saw an entry notice for the King and Queen’s Cup Classic, a transatlantic yacht race from New York to Spain. Knowing that races across the Atlantic had always demanded a larger class of sailing yacht of at least one hundred feet, he leaned in to read the specifications and was gratified to see that they didn’t limit the class of boat. Looking out the club window at his powerfully built Mohawk he thought, why not?

  Although no yachtsman in history had taken the risk of racing a sixty-foot boat across the ocean, Dudley was confident that the Mohawk could not only perform well but could maneuver easily around the larger, more cumbersome boats. While smaller yachts had certainly been sailed across the oceans, no one had ever raced one; and, as any sailor knows, pleasure-cruising from point to point, motoring into ports, even sailing off course when necessary to avoid storms, was very different from nonstop, point-to-point racing across 3,000 miles of unforgiving sea.

  A week into the race, Dudley spotted a steamship off the Mohawk’s port side. He grabbed his field glasses and saw that it was the Italian luxury liner Conte Biancamano on its route from New York to Genoa. While he had never been on that specific ship, he’d been on many like it and was familiar with their luxurious appointments. Now, with seven days’ worth of stubble on his chin, salt crusting his eyebrows, and sweat stains under his arms, he looked at the far-off ship; its marble baths, leather and oak bar infused with the smells of fine whiskey and Cuban cigars, and wide promenade deck seemed a world away.

  With a final look at the billowing smokestacks disappearing over the flat ocean, Dudley returned his focus to the Mohawk and to a storm brewing in the skies behind him. He ordered the crew to lock down the hatches and prepare for the gale, trimming the sails and lashing themselves to the mainmast and cockpit. For nearly six hours the Mohawk heaved from side to side, the storm soaking her decks and battering the men. Several times a crewman lost his footing and was nearly washed overboard, but his lash kept him on the boat, albeit bruised and exhausted. Finally, the gale moved off and calm returned to the sea and the Mohawk. Those would be the only rough seas of their nearly month-long race. Most of their remaining days to Spain were spent like any other enjoyable sail in fair weather off the New England coast, with Dudley watching the woolly telltales tied to the bottom of the sail for any whisper of air to be captured in the thousands of square feet of canvas above. Their nights were spent quietly, even serenely, as each man took his turn at the helm while his mates caught a nap or ate. One night Dudley watched a pod of porpoises play alongside the Mohawk, jumping through its wake as if through an invisible circus hoop. Then, as if touched by a giant torch, the seas lit up with phosphorescence through which the Mohawk sailed, leaving an aisle of shimmering green light in its wake.

  Twenty-five days after leaving New York, the Mohawk raced to a second-place finish in Santander, Spain. Her crew looked more like a band of pirates than Ivy League men, each sporting a beard and their tattered college sweaters. Welcomed like heroes home from a successful battle, the men of the Mohawk accepted an enormous silver chalice from King Alfonso XIII and Queen Eugenia Victoria. That night, the streets of Santander were alive with celebration, and everywhere the crews of the various yachts went they were feted by handsome, dark-eyed women offering the men bottomless carafes of sangria.

  In every race he entered, Dudley listed himself as “owner and captain.” While he enjoyed the trappings and gentility of the sport, it was more about the boat and the ocean and the race and he wanted to be crucially involved at its heart—the helm. It was a love he shared with his younger brother, Grafton.

  Grafton Wolfe Smith was a charming man with a beauty that was almost ethereal. From his earliest days he attracted friends and lovers and gained easy entry into high society’s finest clubs and private organizations from Maine to Palm Beach. Like Dudley, he owned and sailed his own yachts, and for years, on any given weekend, at least one of the Wolfe/Smith brothers could be found racing in regattas off the eastern seaboard. Grafton also developed a love for horse breeding and racing, and, in September 1931, while driving his new car home to Hamilton, Massachusetts, from the racetrack in Saratoga, New York, he lost control and hit a telephone pole. The car had been going so fast and the impact was so violent that three wheels were sheared off. Grafton was thrown clear of the wreckage, unconscious but still alive. Passing motorists stopped at the scene, piled him into their car, and drove him to a nearby hospital. His wife, Janice, was called, and she raced through the night to the hospital. But when she arrived, he had died of head injuries. Perhaps suspecting that alcohol may have been involved, the family ordered a toxicology report which came back clean; no alcohol or drugs were found in his system. The young man had simply been driving too fast.

  After Grafton’s death and perhaps growing weary of New York, Boston, and Maine society, Dudley decided to return to Europe where the parties had more dignity and the sports more adventure.

  Having driven through the Alps during the war, Dudley was familiar with the premier climbing and skiing areas of Europe: Zermatt, Chamonix, the Arlberg, and Davos. There, he hired renowned mountain guides to help him become proficient in his new sports. Solidly built and strongly muscled, he always showed resolute determination and good humor as he struggled to master the ropes, crampons, and ice axe maneuvers of climbing. But on skis, as he had on deck, he found that he had a natural sense of balance and coordination which allowed him to excel. As with sailing, he found he loved the thrill and speed of racing and entered many regional competitions. At the sharp pop of the gun, he would throw his weight down the slope, his strong legs hugging the heavy wooden skis close together, almost casually transferring his weight back and forth along the carved edges, the tips clattering along the icy course as he sped to the bottom of the steep runs. Because he competed against much younger men who had been reared on the racecourses, he never won an event, but he always crossed the finish line. He also loved the physical challenge and exhaustion of ski touring, and while exploring and conquering largely untouched peaks on his skis and skins, he achieved over thirty difficult summits and traverses, chief among them a ski traverse of the Mont Blanc massif.

  Over twenty years before the famed Telepherique de l’Aiguille du Midi was built, enabling tourists, climbers, and skiers to ride up the side of the massive mountain, Dudley and his party climbed over 9,000 feet from Chamonix village to the Vallot hut on their skis. From there he performed an early and still rare ski traverse of Mont Blanc to the Mer de Glace. He also climbed rock faces on the Brevant and reached scores of summits in the western Pyrenees, the Alps—including Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn—and in the Bregaglia group of the Engadine along the Swiss–Italian border.

  While skiing in the Tyrol above St. Anton in the Arlberg district of Austria in the spring of 1934, Wolfe watched as an attractive woman with a heroically female body—curvaceous, strong, and statuesque—slalomed down the slopes, effortlessly mastering the icy course. At the bottom, he watched as she tore off her ski hat, releasing a thick crop of short, dark curls, and smiled broadly at her companion. Inquiring, he was told her na
me was Alice Damrosch.

  Alice Blaine Damrosch was born on May 18, 1892, the eldest daughter of the famed conductor of the New York Symphony, Walter Johannes Damrosch, and the granddaughter of James Gillespie Blaine, secretary of state under presidents Garfield and Harrison. The Damrosch dynasty, as one writer called it, included several generations of European musical heritage, and after Walter Damrosch and his brother Frank immigrated to America in 1871, they began building a musical tradition in their new country. Walter had four daughters, who grew up in a house where there was always a guest musician visiting, his cello leaning against the door frame or his sheet music on the piano.

  Alice’s first marriage in 1914 to Hall Pleasants Pennington, whom the New York Times described as a man who “gardens,” ended almost before it began. The ceremony was on Lake Champlain in upstate New York, after which the newlyweds canoed off in a flurry of rose petals as musicians played on the shore. But that was evidently the end of the romance; early the next morning, Alice canoed alone back to where her family was staying on the lake and spent the rest of her honeymoon with them.

  Alice went through romances quickly. No man, it seemed, quite lived up to her family’s artistic or intellectual standards. A man had to be someone and do something, and while her beaus entertained her in the short run, none seemed to measure up for the long haul. Pleasants was no different. While they stayed married for years, they remained childless and she lived more or less a single woman’s life, splitting her time between New York society and long vacations in Europe. When they finally divorced in the late 1920s, she escaped to the mountains of Austria, where she found a new life of hunting and skiing with a host of creative and accomplished friends. After killing her first ibex, she wrote to her family in New York, “The blood was so hot you could have boiled an egg in it!”

  While children bored her and she never sought to have her own, Alice was a powerful presence whose nieces and nephews adored and feared her in often equal measure. She could be ruthless in her comments, cruelly pointing out if one had gained weight or had an unsightly blemish. After the mortified niece fled to her room sobbing, Alice would wave off her biting criticism with “Well, that’s the way I see it.” When she took her niece Lisa shopping for her first evening gown, what should have been a pleasant outing became an ordeal when Alice demanded, “Why can’t you stand up straight?” and made cutting remarks about the adolescent girl’s lingering baby fat. But Alice was also tough on herself and fanatical about her own appearance. Rising before dawn every morning of her summer visits to the family house in Bar Harbor, Maine, she would climb to the summits of nearby mountains in Acadia National Park before breakfast in order to stay in shape. In the 1930s, when she was well into her forties, she became one of the first women to ski the unrelenting ice wall of Tuckerman’s Ravine, a glacial cirque on Mount Washington’s southeast face in New Hampshire.

  She was also a gracious hostess, inviting those same nieces to Austria for extended vacations, sitting for hours showing them the art of needlepoint, and teaching each of them how to ski, although the lessons were far from gentle. “That is a stupid way to ski! Bend your knees, for heaven’s sake!” she would yell down the slope. Still, her nieces looked forward to their visits. Her apartments in St. Anton and New York always had the best of everything. The bed linens were Egyptian cotton and professionally laundered so that the creases were crisp. The lavender soap was imported from England, the towels monogrammed, and always there were cut flowers in every room.

  Part Jewish, Alice had an abiding hatred of the Nazis and their rapid encroachment on her beloved second home of Austria. Although deeply political and entirely outspoken, she would don her white gloves and society hat and play the role of pampered, ignorant American matron presenting herself at Third Reich military offices in order to gain the release of her detained Jewish friends, among them Hans Kraus, a famed orthopedic surgeon.*

  In 1931, at the age of thirty-nine, she won a gold medal at the Parsenne Ski Derby at Davos, Switzerland. Three years later, while skiing above St. Anton in the spring of 1934, she met a gentle, soft-spoken, and earnest yachtsman and budding ski racer. Soon, the feisty divorcee and the understated bachelor realized they shared a deep passion for all things outdoors, not only skiing and touring but hunting as well. While Dudley lacked a profession, he nonetheless was a charming, generous man who didn’t throw his money around garishly, as so many wealthy Americans did, and she knew he loved her. She feared her family would take issue with his apparent idleness, but they took issue with everybody, and besides, she and Dudley would spend most of their year in Austria, thousands of miles away from her family’s critical eyes.

  In late October 1934 Dudley and Alice cabled home to America: they had gotten married in Geneva and would be sailing to New York on the SS Bremen in early November for the obligatory celebrations. Alice was also organizing a fundraiser in New York in December for what would become America’s first women’s Olympic ski team, after which she and Dudley would return to Austria for her favorite season, Christmas. She loved him dearly, but her family, true to form, thought him a somewhat bland playboy. Hoping to soften at least one of her sisters’ edges, Dudley bought Anita Damrosch a Cartier gold watch. Whether or not it changed her opinion of her brother-in-law, she cherished the watch the rest of her life.

  For the next three years, the couple criss-crossed the Atlantic, traveling between their homes in New York, Maine, and Austria. In Europe, Dudley bought a Buick Phaeton roadster, and the two toured the mountain towns and villages, stopping for the night only when they found inns which looked suitably quaint and clean. But it was in Alice’s small and cozy apartment at the Haus Angelika in St. Anton, and at her tranquil hunting preserve in the mountains above, where Dudley felt truly at home, perhaps for the first time in his life.

  Dudley was comfortable and loved the mountains of Europe, but by early 1938 he was spending more time on his own than with Alice. With the excuse of pursuing his new passion, climbing, he spent huge chunks of time in Zermatt, Chamonix, and Trento. After only four years of marriage, he realized that he preferred his solitude, his freedom. He loved Alice, but it wasn’t enough to maintain a marriage and he told her he wanted a divorce.

  In one of the rare times in her life that she showed weakness, Alice sat in her small living room in the Haus Angelika, put her head in her hands and cried. Her niece, who was visiting from America, watched from an alcove, stunned into silence at her aunt’s display of raw emotion. She had never seen it before and she would never see it again. Over the course of the next several months, while Dudley returned to Maine for the summer and Alice remained in Austria, they wrote many letters to each other about the failing marriage. She begged him to reconsider and return, hoping that he missed her as much as she missed him. But it was to no avail. The marriage was over.

  While Dudley and Alice weren’t very good at marriage, they were wonderful friends and would remain close. In October they met in New York, and, after discussing some of the more mundane details of the divorce—her alimony, dividing the wedding gifts, and how long he would pay the rent on the apartment—they decided to have a party, show Dudley’s slides, and celebrate the fact that, divorce or no divorce, they were still the best of friends.

  As Alice sat down to write out the invitations, she playfully wrote out the phonetic spelling of a guest’s name.

  “Dear Mr. Vissner,” she wrote, inviting Fritz Wiessner to the slide show and dinner party, adding a PS: “Black tie!”

  Chapter 3

  Climbing’s Controversial Genius

  Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.

  Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

  —GOETHE

  Fritz Wiessner, 1939. (Courtesy of the George C. Sheldon Family)

  At the start of the twentieth century, the earth’s highest places, fourteen peaks that stand above 8,000 meters (26,240 feet), were little known and entirely unconquered. While Dudley Wolfe was learning th
e ropes and anchors of sailing, adventurers across America and Europe were learning the ropes and anchors of a new exploit, extreme high-altitude climbing. Although the summit of 15,781-foot Mont Blanc had been reached in the late 1700s and the 14,692-foot Matterhorn had been first scaled in 1865, little was known of the mountains of the vast Himalayan range, or of man’s ability to survive at nearly twice the altitude of the roof of the Alps. But scientists, explorers, and mountaineers alike were determined to find out.

  With the wildest edges of the earth thoroughly discovered, adventurers at the turn of the twentieth century set their sights on the far-off peaks of Nepal, Tibet, and India, and mountaineering clubs in London, Milan, Berlin, and New York organized expeditions to the still untouched giants.* After early British and Italian explorers had tried and failed to climb K2, the world’s second highest peak, in remote northern India, they declared the mountain’s sheer cliffs, unrelenting avalanches, and brutal weather unconquerable. Then, because Britain’s “Great Game” with Russia after World War I determined which power would control central Asia, the British turned away from K2 and focused their attention on the world’s tallest (and therefore in the eyes of many, best) mountain, Everest. Not to be excluded from the great conquests, German climbers set their sights on Nanga Parbat, a 26,660-foot peak near K2 at the western edge of the Himalayas in northern India, and the Americans were left with the seemingly impossible K2.