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

by Jennifer Jordan

  After weeks of preparation lower on the mountain, on July 26 Fritz and Bill House rose at 2:45 a.m. and began their thirteen-hour assault. Climbers who had already tried to reach the summit and failed watched the two men’s progress through field glasses, spying them at 10:30 a.m. carefully traversing a narrow snow patch that clung to an almost vertical face. At 3 p.m., the glint of an ice axe near the summit was spied from ten miles away. And finally, at 3:40 p.m., Fritz was seen inching his way along a knife-edged snow ridge the final feet to the summit, with House close on his heels. Two Americans had conquered Canada’s most sought-after peak and Wiessner’s reputation as a fearless climber only increased.

  Wiessner quickly followed that exploit by aiming for Wyoming’s Grand Teton and its unclimbed north face. After examining topographical maps of the mountain and repeatedly climbing to the base of the route to stare at its jagged cliffs, he finally decided on his course up the sheer rock wall. On August 10, 1936, he positioned himself at the base of the route and, again with the formidable Woolsey there for the press rather than as a summit partner, organized his gear for the morning’s climb.

  Earlier that evening, Wiessner had run into a Teton guide whom he pumped for information about the route and the conditions on the mountain. The guide, Paul Petzoldt, answered all of his questions, bid him goodnight, then raced down into the valley to roust his brother, Eldon, and his summer hired hand, Jack Durrance, out of bed. Explaining that Fritz Wiessner was at the base of the Grand and poised to make its first ascent, Petzoldt insisted that they, not Wiessner, should have the honors of the great North Face prize. Less than an hour later, packed and ready for the assault, the trio tiptoed past Wiessner’s quiet tent, where he and Woolsey slept. Working through the night and into the morning, with Durrance leading the route most of the way, the three men made the much-coveted summit by midday. When Wiessner rose he learned that Durrance and the Petzoldts had in effect stolen his first ascent. He went ahead anyway, making what was then the second ascent. The insult so infuriated Fritz that two years later, when Paul Petzoldt applied for membership in the American Alpine Club, Fritz lobbied hard against his inclusion, telling a club official that Petzoldt was “not the kind of man we want as a member.”*

  After his bittersweet success on the Grand, Fritz set his sights on an odd geological rock formation in eastern Wyoming which had beguiled countless generations of Native American Indians and pioneers: Devil’s Tower. Looking somewhat like a ruined Bundt cake on an empty banquet table, the 2,367-foot plug of igneous rock juts out of the ground in the middle of the plains thirty miles from the South Dakota border. According to Sioux legend, the tower was created by the Great Spirit, who lifted the rock high above the Belle Fourche River Valley to save three maidens being pursued by bears. As the bears tried to reach the maidens on the elevated rock, each slipped and fell, leaving claw marks that give the rock its distinctive, fluted surface. After the bears fell to their deaths, the maidens slid down from their lofty perch on a rope of wildflowers.

  The first recorded climb of Devil’s Tower was in 1893 when two ranchers, dressed in overalls and cowboy boots, assembled a ladder of individual wooden pegs which they pounded into the deep cracks, remnants of which can still be seen. On the top, they left a large American flag.

  Theatrics aside, the man most famous for his ascent is Fritz Wiessner, who in 1937 not only climbed it without a ladder (or flag), but without any protective gear save a single piton near the top which he later regretted, saying it was unnecessary. Breathing in great huffs and puffs from the effort, Wiessner inched his body up the cracks and crags, leading partners Bill House and Lawrence Coveney the entire route. Nearing the top, he shouted down to his partners. While the words were unintelligible, their meaning was clear to House, who had heard them before on Waddington. The words meant “We are going to the top.”

  With an odd sort of fate cementing their relationship, the next man to climb Devil’s Tower in a style which would become legendary was Jack Durrance, in September 1938. Like Wiessner, he and his partners climbed it “free”—without protective gear anchoring them to the rock in case of a fall. The line he chose to ascend was named the Durrance Route and has become the Tower’s most common ascent for today’s climbers.

  Even while he was making headlines on American mountains and rock walls, Fritz remained fascinated by the mountains in remote southern Asia. Those stunning peaks were majestic, never scaled, and twice as high as anything in Europe or the American lower forty-eight, and Wiessner knew that if he succeeded in reaching even one of the summits, he would secure his future as well as a place in climbing history. He had seen the way Knowlton’s articles and book on Nanga Parbat had gained her fame and a certain measure of fortune; if he were to actually come home with a summit, he thought his story would be invaluable.

  Having proven himself an able high-altitude climber on Nanga Parbat (although Willy Merkl told the president of the Alpine Club in London that he didn’t trust Wiessner on snow enough to invite him to join Germany’s 1934 attempt*), Wiessner lobbied the American Alpine Club to give him control of America’s first major assault on K2 in 1938. However, when India finally issued a permit in October 1937, Wiessner didn’t have the money to leave. He had recently started his own business making and selling ski wax and it was struggling; to leave it for several months was financially impossible. He handed the reins over to one of his climbing partners, a young man who was in his third year of medical school at Columbia, Charles S. Houston (pronounced How-stun, like the street in lower Manhattan).

  Fritz and Charlie were good friends, having spent years skiing in New Hampshire and climbing the rock walls near New Haven, Connecticut, together. Although Fritz was thirteen years older than Charlie, both were new members of the American Alpine Club, and they enjoyed each other’s company. But when Wiessner turned down the leadership of the 1938 expedition for which he had lobbied so hard, many, including Houston, suspected ulterior motives, namely that he was waiting for another team to do the Herculean work of finding the best route up the mountain, a route which Wiessner could then merely climb, saving weeks of valuable expedition time and energy. Before stepping aside, Wiessner made it clear that he wanted the 1939 permit for K2, if granted. Meanwhile, Houston assumed leadership of the 1938 attempt. Before Charlie left for the mountain, Fritz told his friend that it was much more important to come through “without the loss of life rather than a brilliant success brought through being reckless.”

  Over seventy years later, Charlie Houston’s 1938 American expedition to K2 is still singled out as one of the finest in Himalayan climbing history on all fronts: the talent of its climbers, the preparation and execution of their goal, which was to ascertain the most climbable route, the hard work and careful risk management, and the cooperation, respect, and even love among the members of the team.* Except for some ugly business after the expedition involving Paul Petzoldt and an American missionary’s wife,† the team was hugely successful. Houston and Petzoldt climbed thousands of feet higher on the mountain than any man ever had, and there was speculation that they might even have made the summit if not for a limited supply of matches—needed to melt snow for cooking and, more important, drinking water. However, Houston said later that even if he had had more matches, he could not have gone farther. He had reached his climbing ceiling. Those moments at 26,000 feet, his personal altitude record, were crystallized in his brain as the most emotionally charged minutes of his life, as he struggled to control his racing pulse and mixed feelings of regret and relief at deciding to turn back.

  Charlie and his “brotherhood of the rope” returned to the States and were celebrated coast to coast as conquering heroes, feted with extravagant dinners and given a lucrative book contract. Their reconnaissance of the mountain had been successful, and Charlie and the team reported that the Abruzzi Ridge up the east spine of the mountain provided the best chance at the summit. While steep, unforgiving, and providing little by way of proper campsites, the
route was, except for a section between Camps VI and VIII between 23,000 and 25,000 feet, relatively free of avalanche danger.

  With Houston’s team home and priceless new information about the route in hand, it was now Fritz’s turn. Charlie shared every detail of his own expedition with Fritz, from the grueling 330-mile trek to the mountain to 26,500 feet on the Abruzzi Ridge, the point he and Petzoldt had reached before turning back. Houston even wrote Wiessner a two-page, single-spaced note in which he delineated the climbing route from base camp, up the glacier to the base of the route, through each of the high camps, to his and Petzoldt’s high point, explaining every major rock formation, obstacle, tent platform, and avalanche-prone slope on the 12,000-foot ascent. He also sent photos and amended the Duke of Abruzzi’s maps of the mountain, explaining in careful detail where and why they chose the route and camps they did. Fritz now had a virtual blueprint for his climb.

  Fritz turned his attention to building a strong team. He was at a crossroads in his life and he wanted K2. He needed K2. He was thirty-eight years old, single, and not yet an American citizen. He was living in a small apartment in the Columbia Heights section of Brooklyn and his ski wax business was barely covering his bills. With business only getting worse as the Depression rolled on, he was forced to send solicitation letters to friends and colleagues, many of them in the Alpine Club, asking them to invest in his company. When they did, it was rarely more than twenty-five dollars. To make ends meet and to stay in shape, he worked several jobs, including washing windows on the Empire State Building. Every day he dealt with the growing anti-German sentiment, not only in the club but in the country as a whole, as another world war looked more probable every day. He had always hoped to find a rich American widow and live the good life, but so far that hadn’t happened. K2 was his chance to move beyond his modest life and to make something of himself. After Knowlton’s success, he saw that America had a fascination with the Himalayas and that a living could be made climbing them. If he were to climb this so-called unclimbable mountain in India, he would be set for life, possibly even as a guide for his well-heeled friends in the AAC who were itching to explore the giant peaks. He had been dreaming of K2 for years, mapping out every aspect of the expedition in minute detail. But with only a couple of months before he was to leave for the mountain, he still hadn’t nailed down his team or its funding. His whole dream could vanish if he didn’t recruit enough teammates to cover the $15,000 cost of the undertaking.

  Then Fritz received a note from Alice Wolfe inviting him to attend a black-tie dinner party at the Wolfes’ Fifth Avenue penthouse where her husband, Dudley, would show some of his climbing slides from Europe.

  Suddenly, the expedition’s future looked much brighter.

  Chapter 4

  The 1939 American K2 Expedition Team

  When men climb on a great mountain together, the rope between them is more than a mere physical aid to the ascent; it is a symbol of the spirit of the enterprise. It is a symbol of men banded together in a common effort of will and strength against their only true enemies: inertia, cowardice, greed, ignorance, and all weaknesses of the spirit.

  —CHARLES S. HOUSTON

  The 1939 American K2 team: Back row, left to right: George Sheldon, Chappell Cranmer, Jack Durrance, George Trench; front row, left to right: Eaton Cromwell, Fritz Wiessner, Dudley Wolfe. (Courtesy of the George C. Sheldon Family)

  Within weeks of seeing Fritz at the slide show, Dudley had committed to going to K2. He booked his passage to Europe, sublet the penthouse, updated his will, and ordered the necessary equipment and clothes: a new ice axe, two pairs of leather mountaineering boots, the best steel crampons he could find, and layers of wool and silk underwear. What he hadn’t done was tell his family, in particular his older brother, Clifford.

  From the day the brothers had returned from World War I, Clifford had taken charge of running the family and its businesses. Their grandfather had been close to ninety at the time and Clifford was the eldest of his male heirs, so it had fallen to him. While Clifford and Dudley were close, loving brothers, they were very different men. Each was reserved and conservative, both politically and socially, but Dudley made adventure his life while Clifford donned a three-piece suit and polished brown leather shoes and made his life the family business. While he had no control over his younger brother, Clifford nonetheless judged Dudley’s lifestyle that of a playboy and not a serious man. When Dudley wrote of hunting in the hills above St. Anton and skiing down the couloirs of Chamonix, Clifford responded rather stiffly how “grand it must be to have the time for such exploits.” In the year before the expedition, Clifford had had enough of bearing the entire burden while Dudley played and had suggested that perhaps Dudley should spend some time with him on Wall Street and learn the family business.

  For his part, Dudley knew Clifford was right. His brother had taken on managing the estate and overseeing the books of the vast Smith fortune, and done a damn fine job of it, while he merely had his name on the door at their New York offices. And yet Clifford seemed to thrive on the spreadsheets and business pages of the New York Times as Dudley never had. Instead, he had tried to define himself through ever more daring challenges. Rather than let his poor eyesight allow him to sit out the war, he had gone to Europe and volunteered with the French Foreign Legion. In deciding to race across the Atlantic, he had shown the world it could be done in a sixty-foot schooner. In climbing in the Alps he had fought hurricane winds and traversed crevasses where only days before men had been lost.

  But Clifford did not consider his brother’s exploits a legitimate use of time, and as Dudley packed his bags for yet another adventure, this one nearly a year long by the time he would finally set foot back in America, he put off telling his brother of the expedition. Instead, he left Boston before the Christmas holidays giving the impression that he would return to Maine in time to put his new sleek, single-masted racing sloop, the Highland Light, in the water for the season, most likely by mid-May. With his ticket to Bombay already in hand, he had no intention of doing so.

  Before leaving for K2, and with a list of things to accomplish before he did, Dudley went to New York and hurriedly met with his attorney to draw up a new will. While in the city, he went to see his cousin, Clifford Warren Smith, Jr. Just as B. F. had feared, the man, now thirty-seven, was steadily killing himself with a fast life, well lubricated by alcohol, illegal drugs, and a revolving door of women, the latest being a Ziegfeld Follies cigarette girl. While even Clifford Junior’s mother had written him off as irredeemable, Dudley remained in touch with his cousin and even considered delaying his trip overseas when he seemed close to death. But, having been assured by the doctors that Clifford Junior wasn’t in imminent danger, Dudley continued getting his own estate in order for his protracted absence.

  From New York, Dudley traveled to Boston where he made sure to buy some items which would be with him every step of the way: two pairs of double-layer khaki pants from Blauer’s in Harvard Square and a pair of Asa Osborne’s world-famous leather and canvas gauntlets with fitted wool liners. He had walked to Osborne’s store on Beacon Street himself, just to make sure of the fit. They were the best cold-weather gloves made, and Dudley felt a certain satisfaction flexing his hands in the soft leather mitt. As he had in the ambulance corps and before each sailing race, Dudley pulled out a fine-tipped fountain pen, carefully spelling out “W O L F E” on each of his items, from his fleece-lined anorak to the cuff of his Osborne gloves. One afternoon he stood like a model in his new gear, turning this way and that in front of a tall standing mirror in his bedroom, making sure everything fit and had no loose seams. His nephew walked by the open door and couldn’t resist telling his uncle he looked like a page out of the L. L. Bean catalogue. Dudley smiled and nodded.

  On December 10, 1938, Dudley made a final check of his gear and papers before leaving for the harbor where the SS Georgic waited to take him to Europe. As he left B. F.’s house at 21 Commonwealth Avenue, where Ma
bel had spent more and more time during the old man’s last years, Dudley was suddenly glad his mother had died several years before.

  One of the last times he had seen his mother, he had joined her in her favorite holiday event, something she called “contributing to the Police Fund.” Every Christmas she would dress in her Sunday best, down to the velvet blouse with her grandmother’s cameo at her neck and a sable shawl wrapped loosely around her shoulders, call for the car to be brought around to the front of the house, and then be driven the length of Commonwealth Avenue. Whenever she saw a policeman, she would have the driver pull over so that she could extend her gloved hand through the window to give the officer money. The cop would tip his hat and bow with a “Thank you, Miss Smith,” as he tucked the bills into his heavy overcoat. It was a tradition she had learned as a girl first in Omaha and then here in Boston, driving the rounds with B. F. In those days, of course, she and her father had ridden in a horse-drawn carriage and B. F. had brought a bottle of whiskey and cups and would stop and drink with each man as if he were a cousin. Like her father, she believed the tradition helped keep their lavish home and property safe from criminals.

  Mabel had always worried more about him, Dudley thought, than she had about either of his brothers, even though Grafton, as it turned out, was the son who had needed the extra concern. He, Dudley, had always managed to balance his adventure with prudence and planning. From his trench warfare to his transatlantic racing, he had respected danger, not challenged it, and had known when to pull back, on the gas and on the tiller, in order to remain within a safe margin while staying in the game.