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

by Jennifer Jordan

  Ironically, it would be a German immigrant built like a fireplug who was the driving force behind the American Alpine Club’s dedication to K2.

  BORN IN DRESDEN in 1900 into a prosperous but not wealthy family, Fritz Hermann Ernst Wiessner developed a passion for art, architecture, and opera, learning to love beauty and perfection, particularly in nature. He was also a patriot, and even though Germany was apparently losing the punishing Great War once the Americans entered it, as soon as he legally could he joined a special military unit called the Schützen and was shipped to the front lines near Belfort, close to the Crown Prince’s army. Luckily, the armistice was signed before Fritz saw any active duty, as most of the Schützen youth were killed within weeks on the front.

  When the war ended, Fritz returned to his first love, the outdoors. Spending untold hours devouring his father’s mountaineering books, he read of the great exploits of the nineteenth-century climbers, from Charles Barrington on the Eiger in 1858 to the Matterhorn’s first and deadly ascent in 1865, when the Englishman George Hadow slipped on descent, pulling two other climbers in his party away from the face. A fourth teammate was able to wrap the rope around a rock but it snapped, and all of Zermatt watched through field glasses as the four men fell thousands of feet to their deaths down the north wall. The disaster would forever mythologize the mountain, and with every new generation of climbers there would be a fresh crop of men eager to challenge its deadly legacy. Still a teenager, Fritz Wiessner became one of them.

  Throughout his life, Wiessner had a pronounced, almost balding forehead, yet retained a boyish face and impish smile. At only five feet five inches and with a body that was all sinew and muscle, he had the perfect physique for scaling rock walls using primarily his fingertips and toes. Fritz learned how to climb with his cousin Otto Wiessner, and together the two would travel to the sandstone towers of the Elbsteingebirge district south of Dresden. One weekend, Fritz took the train with some other climbers from a local club to a rock tower near the Czech border. Otto was delayed but planned to catch up with Fritz and the others at the wall; when Otto couldn’t find them, he ventured off on his own, soloing the so-called Winklerturm. As he descended he saw that another group on the wall had gotten into some trouble and went to assist them. Suddenly a sandstone block under his fingers came loose and he fell. Later that evening, Fritz walked through the small town near the wall and noticed that several locals who knew him were looking at him very oddly.

  “What’s the matter?” Fritz finally asked a shopkeeper he recognized.

  Without a word the man took him to a small house near the town’s inn. Entering the dark parlor, he could see that there was a body laid out on a table. Moving closer, he suddenly stopped, stunned and horrified. The bloody, crushed face was Otto’s.

  At just twenty-one, Fritz suffered his first climbing death. It remained his most horrifying.

  Otto’s death, though, did little to curb Wiessner’s love of the rock, and soon he was pioneering some of the hardest rock climbs in Europe, defining a new standard for technical difficulty while spurning the use of protective pitons to ascend the cliff walls. Throughout the Alps, his feats would go largely unchallenged for decades. His love of the mountains in large part dictated his life goals, including deciding he would climb every mountain in the Alps above 4,000 meters, or 13,000 feet. (Like the Himalayas, the Alps are measured in meters and those who climb them set goals to achieve the highest in each range.) No one could deny that he was fabulously talented on rock, but he was less gifted on snow, ice, and at high altitudes, once collapsing from mountain sickness at 12,800 feet on Mont Blanc and again at the same height on Mount Rainier outside of Seattle, Washington.

  Famous as Fritz was for his brilliant and fearless climbing, he was infamous for his silent brooding and violent temper. When asked to describe him, everyone from his children to his worst detractors used words like “sullen,” “stubborn,” “temperamental,” and “explosive.” Some offered “romantic,” “depressive,” and “Germanic.” With fierce mood swings that would take him from cheerful and engaged to raging and resentful within seconds, Wiessner was a complex and driven personality. The term “he does not suffer fools gladly” could have been coined to describe him. He could utterly dismiss a person who lacked the proper social standing, and he refused to even look at a climbing partner while the man’s elbows were on the table or if he held his fork like a shovel rather than a pen. But Fritz could also show enormous patience when talking to a novice climber, explaining the differences between climbing on limestone and on granite, or how to properly use one’s toes to power up the rock while the fingers merely acted as guides up the wall. As much as he could be a snob about poetry and etiquette, he would take anyone who asked into the mountains, proud to introduce the man or woman to their pristine beauty and complicated rock walls. While he was something of a feminist, including women on rock and mountain climbing expeditions at a time when women had barely been allowed to vote, never mind belay a man on a rope, he also shared a tent with many of them, which begs the question of his motivation. Nonetheless, his inclusion of women on some of his tough expeditions indicated a liberalism not often in evidence in the early days of American, British, Italian, and German climbing.

  In short, Fritz Wiessner was admired and hated, respected and reviled. For Fritz, it was simply all about climbing. The main things he wanted to know about others were: Did the man use fixed protection? Did he climb unsupported or did he need a phalanx of gear and men below him? Did he leave the rock untouched by his having been there? Did he puff up his own resumé, claiming a height never reached or a new route not actually achieved? And mostly, did he make the summit?

  While he could be quite charming, he was also unabashedly German. On a climbing trip to Communist-controlled Dresden in the 1970s, he took his daughter to a restaurant unfortunately situated near a pig farm; he marched into the dining room with his pigeon-like strut and loudly exclaimed to the largely military diners, “Phew! One can smell the influence of the Russians!”

  He was also notorious for his abhorrence of all things mechanical: radios, cameras, even bicycles. If it had a moving part which he might at some point have to adjust, Fritz avoided it whenever possible. Automobiles were his Achilles heel, which may have accounted for his appalling driving habits. Hunched forward with his chin nearly on the steering wheel, he commandeered the road as if every car in front of him were there to be overtaken, all the while jerking and lurching through traffic because he was never able to master the clutch. Once, while driving through East Germany with American climber Henry Barber in 1972, he became increasingly frustrated and confused by the traffic patterns and pedestrian paths and turned sharply between the lanes of traffic onto a footpath. Police in stiff blue uniforms and large black hats came from every direction trying to get him back on course, but Fritz waved them off, as if they were pesky flies rather than members of the Communist military police. He kept going on the footpath until he reached a break in the cement barrier and finally drove back onto the road. He never understood even the basic mechanics of a car, starting with filling the tank. On that same trip to Germany with Barber when Fritz was in his early seventies, he walked around the car at a gas station with the nozzle in his hand, scratching his head trying to figure out how the fuel got into the car. Reaching the end of his tolerance, he merely stuck the nozzle into the wheel well and started pumping. The irate attendant came running and, after a lot of shouting and gesticulating by both men, told Fritz to get back in the car while the man pumped the gas himself. Fritz blamed the incident on the car’s poor design, rather than his own inability to understand its mechanics. Fritz was a man who couldn’t be wrong.

  By the late 1920s, with the post–World War I depression lingering throughout Europe and business increasingly difficult in war-torn Germany, Fritz decided it was time to leave his beloved Saxony and live in America, even though he knew there was a risk that he might one day have to bear arms against his own
homeland.

  After making his way to America on the SS St. Louis in March 1929, Wiessner found work as a chemist and engineer in New York City, but money was always tight and he supplemented his income with a variety of odd jobs. Oddest among them was washing the windows on the world’s highest building at the time, the Empire State Building. Unlike today’s unionized window washers, who work on protected scaffolding and in limited shifts, Fritz washed the windows while hanging off the building on a single hemp rope tied around his waist, from sunup to sundown, as long as the daylight allowed. Floor by floor, with just his squeegee, a bucket, and the rope, he worked his way up and across the building several stories at a time. He loved the work and would hang high above New York feeling not like an hourly laborer but like a Titan in command of the city beneath him.

  While his work as a chemist was interesting, it did not pay well and Fritz struggled to make ends meet. Still, with every spare dollar he scraped together, Fritz would venture on the weekends to the rock climbing areas scattered throughout the Hudson Valley, Connecticut Valley, and New Hampshire, where he soon became acquainted with America’s still nascent climbing community.

  The American Alpine Club, hoping to replicate London’s venerable Alpine Club, had been established in 1902 by a handful of well-heeled industrialists and intellectuals who had the time and money to climb mountains. In this era, before corporate sponsorships and lucrative media deals, climbers paid the entire cost of their expeditions themselves, which meant that the mountaineering community was limited to affluent adventurers and those whom they invited to join them. By the early 1930s, the club rented space in lower Manhattan for its meetings, charged ten dollars in annual dues, and hadn’t grown much beyond the tweed and leather set that founded it. But it was nonetheless the sole representative of a climbing class in America and, when one of its most respected members, Robert Underhill, agreed to sponsor him in 1932, Fritz readily joined. He had a rich man’s tastes if not a rich man’s resources, and his enormous talent for climbing and his extensive history of record-setting climbs made him an immediate force in that company.

  With his transatlantic connections getting stronger every day, Wiessner was asked to help organize a German–American expedition to climb Nanga Parbat. It would be his first venture to extreme high altitude and a bid to make history. With money a persistent problem, Fritz brought in one of his well-heeled climbing partners from New York, Rand Herron, an aesthete and poet who by the age of thirty had also achieved a long list of first ascents, from the High Atlas in Morocco, to the Russian Caucasus, to Lapland, where he traveled eight hundred miles on skis. Rand then invited his girlfriend to join the climb. She was a journalist named Elizabeth Knowlton, whose articles for the New York Times would help raise money for the expedition.

  With degrees from both Vassar and Radcliffe colleges, Knowlton was the second woman to set foot on one of the Himalayan 8,000-meter peaks (the first was fellow American Fanny Bullock Workman, who explored the Karakoram with her husband in the late 1890s and early 1900s). Although Knowlton was a strong climber, when Wiessner’s team reached 21,000 feet on Nanga Parbat it was decided that she would not continue any higher. In her excellent book about the expedition, The Naked Mountain, published in 1933, she expressed no anger or resentment at not remaining a member of the climbing team. Instead, she acknowledged that she was there primarily as a writer, not a high-altitude climber.

  As the men continued without her, they faced a series of setbacks. They had been forced to hire inexperienced Kashmiri porters from Hunza in northern India because the more skilled Darjeeling Sherpas (Tibetan for “east people”) had already been taken by another expedition. Wiessner described the Hunza as “strong, tall men of the Aryan race,” but they nonetheless suffered from the high altitude and increasing fear of mountain spirits.* Fritz reported that when they finally reached 21,000 feet, the porters were “of no use whatsoever.” Fritz left them there to rest for a few days with instructions to resume carrying loads up the mountain for the team as soon as they were able. Meanwhile, he and the other climbers toiled on and managed to reach a height of 23,000 feet on July 29. A series of storms dumped monstrous amounts of snow on the mountain; in some places it was up to their necks and they had to “swim” through it using both arms and legs to propel themselves forward. Having no communication with the support team below, they had no idea that the porters weren’t merely resting but had called it quits, refusing to climb any further. Fritz, Willy Merkl, and the summit team sat for nearly a month, their strength slowly withering, their stamina and drive dissipating day after day as they waited for food and fuel that never came. On August 20 they were “finally obliged” to retreat down the mountain. After five weeks at 23,000 feet, Fritz found the thicker air and fresh food a “great relief and immediate benefit.” While little was known in 1932 of the physiological devastation of long exposure to high altitude, Wiessner knew first-hand that he and his men had suffered from their thirty-five days on the mountain. After two years of planning, fundraising, training, and arduous travel to reach the foot of the mountain, the team was finished. In The Naked Mountain, Knowlton described the expedition as an exercise in “frustration and futility.”

  The team failed to reach the summit, but great heights had been reached on an 8,000-meter peak and, more important, no man (or woman) had been lost. All in all, it was not a bad showing for a Himalayan expedition in the 1930s.

  However, when Fritz returned to New York, he was not greeted by plaudits. America was reading every day of Adolf Hitler, a short, strutting, autocratic, volatile dictator who bore an unfortunate resemblance to Fritz himself. Then, in 1934, another German expedition to Nanga Parbat lost ten members, including its leader, Willy Merkl, who had also led the 1932 trip. Climbers in the American Alpine Club were beginning to wonder if the Germanic temperament coupled with the demands of the Third Reich to summit against all odds was not a lethal combination. Several club members began to challenge Fritz Wiessner’s membership, and unsubstantiated but persistent rumors spread that he sympathized with and perhaps was even spying for the Third Reich. After the Nanga Parbat disaster, several members called for his resignation from the club. But Fritz also had his defenders, chief among them his good friends Robert Underhill, one of America’s esteemed fathers of rock climbing, and his wife, Miriam Underhill, a talented and pioneering climber in her own right. In a letter of apology to Wiessner for the club’s “grave mistake” in publicly challenging his membership, Underhill told Fritz how personally frustrated he was that Americans were somehow unable to “understand Hitler and what he has done for Germany.” He went on to lament that Americans “cannot realize the moral and spiritual revival which…Hitler seems to have been able to bring about. You have no doubt long since made up your mind simply to endure this almost universal misinterpretation of Hitler and Germany, but I am terribly sorry to see it break out in our club, in such a way.”

  Anti-German sentiment had been rampant in the United States ever since the start of the Great War two decades earlier, and Fritz felt the sting of prejudice in other places as well. Eventually, the threats of expulsion from the AAC subsided, but the rumors never did, and while not a shred of evidence ever surfaced to suggest that Wiessner was working with Germany after he emigrated, many in the club deemed him a Nazi spy to their dying day.

  In the spring of 1935, Wiessner and a group of his European friends, who had all cut their climbing teeth in the Alps, were cresting a cliff in the Shawangunk (pronounced Shon-gum) Mountains one hundred miles north of New York City when they looked to the north and saw a long, high line of white quartz cliffs in the distance. Returning the next weekend, Fritz found a 230-foot-high, eight-mile-long band of seemingly endless climbing routes. His subsequent establishment of the northeast’s most famed climbing area near New Paltz, New York, called the Gunks in climbing circles, is legendary. He and Austrian climber Hans Kraus (Alice Wolfe’s friend whom she helped free from Nazi detainment) used only three pitons
in the upper section of their otherwise free ascent of High Exposure, one of the “jewels of the Gunks,” an overhanging cliff of serrated bands hundreds of feet above the alluvial plains of the Hudson River Valley. Wiessner’s climbing broke such new ground that at a meeting of the American Alpine Club in 1964, when a climber was crowing about having made a first ascent on a crag in Connecticut, Fritz tactfully interrupted and told the man that he in fact had pioneered the route over twenty years before.

  From upstate New York, Fritz traveled west in the summer of 1936 to the Canadian Rockies, where the Coast Range’s highest and still unclimbed mountain stood waiting: Mount Waddington. After sixteen attempts had failed and two climbers had died trying, many believed the 13,260-foot Waddington, more of a stark rock icicle than a real mountain, was simply not climbable. Fritz, however, considered it a puzzle to be solved. For his expedition he chose a small and eclectic group of close friends and stellar athletes, among them William House, a twenty-three-year-old forester from New Hampshire who had relatively little expedition experience but had already gained a name for himself on the rock walls of the White Mountains. And, echoing his inclusion of Elizabeth Knowlton on Nanga Parbat, Fritz included Betty Woolsey, who had raced on Alice Wolfe’s women’s US Olympic ski team in Garmisch the previous February. Not only were Woolsey and Knowlton strong athletes, their very presence helped Fritz to raise awareness and much-needed funds for a string of climbs in the 1930s and 1940s. But, like Knowlton, lacking climbing experience, when summit day came Woolsey was relegated to the support team, and was not one of its stars going for the top.