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

by Jennifer Jordan

  For Jack, the days on the ice weren’t much better. His only winter experience in the mountains had been on skis, not in hobnailed boots, and he was nervous with every step as he negotiated over the crevasses on the daily trips to Camp I. Shaking his head to clear it of the dull ache and fuzziness that had begun to plague him, he tried to learn as fast as he could about glacier technique. The groaning, cracking, almost belching world of ice was foreign to him, and he didn’t much like it. At one point, Fritz and he doubled the safety rope between them and ventured out to the middle of the glacier, testing its strength and scouting for hidden crevasses into which the men might disappear without warning. Once back on the thicker edge of the glacier nearer the mountain, Jack was enormously relieved and hoped he wouldn’t have to repeat the mission. From his first moments at base camp, he had started to fear that he wouldn’t survive this unpredictable, frightening landscape. He knew it was crazy and premonitions had never been his style, but regardless, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he wouldn’t live through the summer and this world of capricious, almost evil ice which he now called home.

  After only a few days working to cache gear low on the mountain, the already weak organization of the team began to deteriorate further. Rather than packing loads and helping keep the mess tent orderly on their rest days at base camp, most of them would nap and read (War and Peace in George’s case, Betrayal in Central Europe in Dudley’s). Jack was left to do a lot of the grunt work and his resentment flourished. Time and again he found himself the only one cleaning up after meals or preparing loads, as well as tending to the medical needs of the Sherpas, his other teammates, and the ever-ailing Chandra. Joe Trench in particular irked him. The British officer had proven to be not only lazy and complaining, he had developed a “sahib attitude” toward Jack, ordering him around like his “Indian servant.” Adding to Jack’s and the team’s frustration with Joe was the fact that although he was supposed to be their liaison to the local porters, he hadn’t bothered to learn their language. He was, in Jack’s thinking, a “total waste of baggage” and a clumsy, even dangerous, load on the mountain—one which Jack was forced to lead up and down the rope when they carried loads to Camps I and II.

  On June 9, before the first light of morning appeared, the men at base camp awoke to the hiss of the stove being started as Noor began breakfast for the team. Nearby, Dudley sat up in his tent and lit his lantern, careful to avoid touching the sides of the tent which had gathered condensation overnight and, if bumped, would rain down on him. All of his clothes and gear sat in neat piles. Today was it. He and Fritz, and hopefully George and Jack, would climb from base to Camp I and then continue on to establish Camp II. With Camp I fully stocked it was now their job to move themselves and the supplies farther up the mountain.

  Like most climbers at base camp, Dudley wore his long underwear day and night except to occasionally give himself what his buddies in the war had called a “French whore’s bath”—quickly swabbing his armpits and groin with soap and water. Still seated in his sleeping bag, he pulled on a plaid wool shirt over the long underwear, then his heavy Irish knit sweater, and on top of it, his fleece-lined anorak. Next, he pulled on a pair of thin wool socks and over them a pair of his heavy ski socks. Finally, he reached for his double-layer khaki pants and scooted into them, half sitting and half lying on the sleeping bag. Fully dressed, he kneeled on the air mattress and began carefully folding and rolling the sleeping bag as small as he could before tying it tight with a leather strap. Sitting back, he picked up his heavy, leather climbing boots, and, even though he had sharpened them the night before, made sure the hobnails had a good edge. He then looked at the gear he would take high on the mountain. Each man could only take what he could carry himself; the Sherpas would not be able to carry any of the sahibs’ personal gear. Leaving his two larger cameras and his movie camera, Dudley put his smaller Leica and a few rolls of film near his rucksack. Quickly but carefully he chose the personal items he would take: toothbrush, small tube of paste, half a cake of soap, metal file to sharpen his hobnails and crampons, small leather journal, pencil, pocket knife, stainless steel match case, and one needle and a spool of heavy black thread from his sewing kit. Then his climbing equipment: crampons, goggles, and windproof double-layer parka and trousers. He would live in the clothes on his back, but took an extra wool shirt and a pair of socks, just in case. He had traveled the world with trunks of clothing and accessories; this time, everything he needed would be on his own back.

  He put the gear into the rucksack, mindful of what he might need during the day’s climb, which he put in last. He tied his sleeping bag to the pack and put on his boots and knee-high gaiters, adjusting the leather foot straps so they weren’t touching a hobnail. He took one last look around the tent to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. Satisfied, he untied the tent flap, turned and blew out the lantern, climbed out backwards on all fours, and reached back in for the rucksack. Standing straight, he slung the rucksack onto his back, put on his leather and canvas gauntlets, and reached for his ice axe, which was stuck upright in the snow by the tent. He was ready to climb K2.

  As the team made its slow progress up the rock and ice slopes, Fritz soon realized he had no one else on the team he could trust to establish the route and anchor the safety rope through the steepest sections. None had the experience or technical ability. He had to assume the entire responsibility. As the history of K2 became written in the years to come, Fritz’s feat in leading and anchoring all but a few of the rope lengths on the mountain is unparalleled. With so much exhausting work ahead of him, Fritz tried to delegate logistical responsibility to his deputy, Tony, giving him a list of directives and instructions that in his absence were to be carried out lower on the mountain: what supplies were to be carried to what camps and when, which of the Sherpas could be trusted with which loads, and so on. But Tony immediately balked, and, while Fritz and Dudley were exploring what was above them on the mountain, he did none of the work Fritz had requested. When Fritz and Dudley descended back to Camp I from their reconnaissance a few days later, they found the entire team lolling about napping and resting. The large Logan tent was a chaos of gear and garbage, no dinner was prepared, no loads readied, and no evident movement had been made toward actually climbing the mountain. Unleashing his infamous temper, Fritz put the blame squarely on Tony, accusing him of insubordination, laziness, and ineptitude. As was his style, after his tantrum Fritz assumed that since he was no longer angry, no one else was either, and that they all went to bed that night “friends.” But Tony was mortified and outraged by Fritz’s attack and decided then and there that he was finished on the mountain, with the expedition, and, in particular, with Fritz. Unknowingly, Wiessner had lost another foot soldier. He had also lost, in every sense of the word, a team player.

  Adding to this troubled mix was Jack’s chronic list of physical maladies, from toothaches to headaches to cold feet to “feeling like shit—winded and despondent,” to sharing Tony’s frustration with their autocratic and often absent warlord. As Jack’s inability to climb grew more evident, his outlook became darker. Adding to his misery and frustration was his lack of good climbing boots. Having left America with only three days’ notice, he had had to order climbing boots in Europe and now awaited their delivery at base camp. In the meantime, his feet froze in thin leather ski boots designed for day trips on the mountains of New England, not the Himalayas.

  Finally, George Sheldon’s inexperience and immaturity began to be a real problem. Fritz knew when he signed Sheldon onto the team that the college junior was young and had never done much climbing outside of a Dartmouth club event, but he had hoped that George’s youth and energy would serve their efforts on K2. Instead, Sheldon had proven to be a brash prankster who, like Jack, enjoyed his alcohol a bit too much, something the austere Fritz found worrisome. Now, as they were getting their teeth into the climb, Fritz saw that George was also unpredictable, as if he simply lacked the will to focus on the
task at hand. As he watched George continue to struggle with the rope in one hand and his ice axe in the other, frequently getting tangled into a dangerous knot, Fritz wondered how he was ever going to get this boy up, never mind off, the mountain. It was not unwarranted criticism; George himself agreed with Fritz’s loud and frequent harangues about how careless and unfocused he was. While George couldn’t put his finger on exactly why his head wasn’t into the climb, he did very little to get it there, and, like a homesick child at summer camp, he started counting the days until the team would depart for home. With sleep increasingly difficult at altitude, he was also self-medicating with phenobarbital, a sleeping aid which suppresses breathing—exactly what he shouldn’t have been doing.

  One of the body’s primary reactions to the loss of oxygen in the atmosphere is to breathe more rapidly to obtain the same amount of oxygen; this in turn causes a reduction in carbon dioxide in the blood. Because a buildup of CO2 is a stronger indicator to the body that it is time to breathe than is a reduction of oxygen, a balancing act arises between the two triggers. When awake, a person can consciously breathe when necessary, but asleep, the lack of a CO2 trigger can cause a person to stop breathing for up to fifteen seconds at a time, eventually waking in a choking gasp for breath. Finally, as if the sleep apnea weren’t bothersome enough, the kidneys excrete more fluid during acclimatization, so that a frequent need to urinate during the night also prevents a person from getting sound, restful sleep. All in all, George was not a happy man.

  Meanwhile, Dudley was going strong. It was as if all his years of quiet focus on straightforward goals—whether points on a map thousands of miles away across an ocean or wounded soldiers who needed to be taken from a trench to a dressing station—had finally come together and enabled him to thrive in the harsh environs. Climbing a mountain, even a Himalayan giant like K2, was a very clear goal to Dudley when looked at through his objective lens: Here is the mountain, here are the obstacles, and this is what I have to do to get there. He had trained, he had studied other expeditions, and he had obtained the best equipment. Now all he had to do was put his nose into the wind and go. And he did, with the slow determination that was his style. At one point, as he rested on the rope, he looked toward the Northeast Ridge and saw a tremendous avalanche break loose from its upper reaches and roar down the slope, gathering fury and width as it reached terminal velocity thundering down the mountain. Traveling at close to 150 miles per hour, it hit the glacier with such force that it filled the valley with a 3,000-foot cloud of snow, dusting the lower mountain with a fresh coat of powder. Dudley looked above him at the rocky ridge and was suddenly very glad they weren’t attempting the less difficult but far more avalanche-prone slopes on either side of the Abruzzi.

  Above Camp II, where the terrain grew steeper and icier, Dudley’s already deliberate pace slowed to inches, rather than feet, per minute. When their heavy steel crampons became too awkward to use on the mixed terrain of rock and ice, Dudley and the team relied on nails pounded into the soles of their leather hiking boots for traction, like an early version of studded snow tires. But the Sherpas, with the exception of the one or two who would be on the summit team, had not been issued the expensive crampons, so when the team encountered slopes so smooth they appeared polished, Fritz had to cut steps into the ice with his axe. Unfortunately, the steps did little to tame the precarious slickness of the ice, and the pace of the climb slowed to a crawl.

  One day, with Jack, Tony, and Dudley on the same rope, the frustration over Dudley’s slow and awkward climbing became more than Jack and Tony could bear, and in Camp II that night, both angrily accused Dudley of poor climbing and said that he had no business being on the mountain. Tony, still smarting from Fritz’s criticism of his deputy leadership, seemed eager to have someone else to blame for their slow progress. Dudley fired back, saying he had done his fair share of work, carried just as many loads, and if indeed he was slow on the rope through dangerous sections, it was for good reason; it was difficult climbing and he was not going to sacrifice prudence for their impatience. He was here to climb this mountain whether Jack or Tony or anybody else liked it. Besides, he charged, looking at Jack, it seemed to him that he was the only one actually climbing this mountain, while Jack was the one constantly complaining about his physical ailments and bad boots.

  It was not a point Jack could argue, particularly after a recent load carry in which he was forced to crawl on all fours, dragging his belly over the rocks imagining he looked like the Little Engine That Could, puffing “I think I can, I think I can” as he pulled himself up the mountain.

  Later, some would speculate that Dudley and Fritz had made an almost client–guide arrangement, whereby Fritz would get Dudley to the summit in exchange for the wealthy man’s greater financial investment in the team. But, given Dudley’s concerns about money and his feelings of being taken advantage of by Fritz and some of the other men on the team, that scenario seems implausible. What does seem possible is that Fritz and Jack had an agreement whereby Jack took on more work, given his discounted fee. Agreement or no, Jack resented the extra labor and was jealous of Dudley’s physical success on the mountain while also being truly worried that the older, slower man was going to get in trouble the higher he went.

  Even though Jack was intimidated by the mountain and its demands, as well as his own physical limitations at altitude, he nonetheless pulled Fritz aside and again urged him not to take Dudley any higher on the mountain. He told Fritz that no one without the skills and experience to descend alone should be allowed to climb into what would become a trap.

  Fritz would hear none of it. He pointed his finger in Jack’s face and said, “You listen to me, Jack! I tell you, if we get up, we shall all be the most famous alpinists in the world!”

  Jack looked at him and thought, I have a fanatic on my hands.

  The conversation was over. Jack backed down.

  The next day, Dudley talked to Fritz about the confrontation. While he had heard Jack’s concerns about his preparedness for the mountain above them, he couldn’t help but marvel at how the others seemed to spend their days grumbling and complaining about nearly every aspect of the arduous expedition: the food, the weather, the rest of the team, and most of all, the mountain. They seemed unprepared for the full challenge of a Himalayan mountain and demoralized by its sheer size and relentless demands. Perhaps because he was older and literally battle-tested, Dudley had remained unflinching in the face of K2’s daunting presence looming above them and instead focused on the immediate piece of mountain at his feet. He also realized how similar climbing was to sailing; at its best, mountaineering taught a man to live in the environment and, like the killer storms off the coast of Ireland, the harsh challenges of K2 were something he relished.

  Still, the public rebuke of his climbing worried him. He did not want to be a burden to the team or an embarrassment to himself. He particularly didn’t want to endanger anyone, himself included. The next day, he took even more care with every step, making sure to watch and learn from Fritz’s moves.

  While Jack found Dudley’s slow technique bothersome, one of K2’s legendary hazards positively terrified him: rockfall. K2 is a mountain of volcanic rubble covered with layers of ice and crumbling rocks which shed constantly, particularly as the sun melts them out of the surface layers. A whirring hum was the men’s only warning before rocks of all sizes showered around them with terrifying randomness. Some came within inches, some flew past and exploded on the slopes below, others nicked at their packs and bruised their legs. Charlie Houston’s 1938 team likened it to trying to climb a slate roof piled high with rocks. For many, the intermittent rockfalls were the most petrifying aspect of the entire climb because they came with no warning and there was almost nothing one could do to avoid a rock traveling at terminal velocity. In essence, it was the world’s highest crap shoot and Jack didn’t like his odds.

  ON JUNE 20, only two weeks into the climb, Dudley, Fritz, and George, whom Fritz s
till hoped would shape up and become a strong member of the team, made a carry from Camp II to Camp IV at 21,500 feet, where they waited for Jack and several Sherpas to follow the next day. Instead, a storm blew in, keeping Jack and the others low on the mountain while trapping the three of them in a tiny tent as the blizzard and hurricane-force winds soon made even leaving the tent suicidal.

  K2’s wind is legendary, and while all of the famed 8,000-meter peaks regularly suffer violent wind, K2’s is nearly constant. Climbers who have survived the mountain talk of how it penetrates everything—tents, sleeping bags, and clothes—and even months after they have returned from the mountain, they can still feel the chill of that wind.

  Day after day the storm battered the men at Camp IV, sounding like a freight train coming through a tunnel at full power, its wind gusts flattening the tent so that the men had to push their backs into the fabric to keep it aloft and take some of the pressure off the poles before they snapped in half. Fearing that a sudden gust would pick up the tent and blow them into Tibet, the men sat and lay in the cramped quarters, trying not to lose their minds. With their heavy books left behind in base camp, boredom forced them to read aloud the labels on their cans of food. After they had exhausted that activity, they fell silent again, staring at the bucking and straining tent around them.

  Two days later, Dudley picked up his journal and saw the date printed on the page: June 22. On the other side of the world Harvard was hosting his class’s tenth reunion and here he was, hoping to survive hurricane winds and subzero temperatures while sitting 21,000 feet up a Himalayan peak. The red and white tents in the Yard that he visualized, the Radcliffe women in their straw hats and white gloves, the Harvard men in top hats and tails, and the robed commencement speaker intoning from the steps of the Harvard Chapel couldn’t have made a starker contrast to the tiny tent perilously perched on K2.