DUDLEY WOLFE’S teammates descended from the mountain and came home to their lives and families, but each was marked by that tragic summer.
Jack Durrance never engaged in the dispute over the stripped camps. While Fritz first privately blamed Jack in letters and conversations with the American Alpine Club members and officers, it was not until 1956 that he did so publicly, in an account in Appalachia magazine (where his friend Miriam Underhill was the editor). While furious, Durrance never defended himself. And even though he didn’t consider himself responsible for the four deaths, he never said so because he “never felt anyone would listen” to him. It was only after Tony Cromwell’s death in 1987 and Fritz Wiessner’s in 1988 that Jack finally allowed his diary to be released, revealing for the first time that Tony had sent the order to him at Camp II to strip the low camps.
Why Fritz fingered Jack and not Tony, and why Jack accepted the blame, is unknown, but many have speculated that Tony’s wealth and standing in the American Alpine Club were the root causes.
Fritz’s dogged determination and lobbying of club officials to have his expedition report seen as the official one, as well as Jack’s absence from the debate, allowed the blame to rest squarely on Jack’s shoulders. While many observers continued to question Fritz’s abandonment of Dudley and his oppressive leadership style, his reputation as a gifted climber gathered him a growing fan base within the American Alpine Club, an admiration which persists to this day.
JACK STRUGGLED with demons most of his life, ones that only became more pronounced after the expedition. His girlfriend, Maria, became engaged to another man while Jack was on K2. Heartbroken, he married his climbing buddy’s sister somewhat on the rebound, and it was a troubled marriage during which the cultivation of irises became his passion. Several months after his return, he went to see Charlie Houston and for two hours talked nonstop about the expedition. It was perhaps the only time he spoke at such length and detail about the trip. What Charlie remembered most about the evening was how tormented Jack appeared, sitting hunched over, talking hour after hour in a rambling monotone. Always a heavy drinker, after the expedition he became a functioning alcoholic, making it through medical school* and able to maintain a practice, but barely. As a teaching physician at the University of Colorado in Denver, he frequently would take his medical students drinking on what he called the “Red Tour,” beginning with red beer at a college pub near the campus, then another at the Red Ram in nearby Georgetown, concluding with a call to their wives from the Red Onion in Aspen. He was a difficult, roving husband and a wildly eccentric father who nicknamed his five children Worm, Bird, Ant, Dee Dee, and Yum Yum, names that they maintain in their middle age. A lover of fast cars, he had a stable of them and well into his eighties he would boast that no one could beat him to the Eisenhower Tunnel, a particularly treacherous section of Interstate 70 west of Denver. When the family drove to Wyoming on vacations, a trip that normally took eight hours would take Jack only four because he drove 100 miles per hour the entire way, thrilling his children and terrifying his wife. Always hating confrontation of any kind, if the children in the back seat began to squabble, Jack would offer them money to stop fighting. He also had a rare Mercedes 300SL gull-wing. When the children were small he would drive them to school and because it had only two seats, the older children would sit on the pontoon fenders wearing goggles to protect their eyes as they navigated through the streets of Denver. He eventually totaled the car, as he did most of his cars. One daughter remembers him driving his Cadillac off the road at full speed to chase rabbits across a field. When he was sixty-five he had a particularly bad automobile accident involving a train and was threatened with forever losing both his driver’s and his medical licenses. He quit drinking cold turkey, but it did little to tame his acid tongue and biting wit. Even his closest relatives considered him a “crusty old soul,” and his relationship with his children was so complicated and fraught with emotion that none of them wanted to speak at his memorial service.
K2 haunted Jack Durrance, yet he deliberately surrounded himself with its ghosts. His inadequate ski boots, which caused him so much anxiety and pain on the expedition, were tacked to his kitchen wall until the day he died in 2003 of Alzheimer’s disease.
CHAPPELL CRANMER, always a quiet man, came home from the mountain and retreated inward, becoming a laconic country minister who never discussed the expedition with his family. In the years that followed, Jack and Chap remained close friends and their children grew up together. But more often than not, Jack would needle Chap about his and George Sheldon’s early quitting of base camp, because he had felt abandoned and left alone to deal with Wiessner, the rescue, and the mess that followed. As Jack’s harrying of Chap became painful for those who watched, the taciturn pastor would merely sit there, his face growing redder and redder, but he would never respond. Even the Durrance children, who witnessed many incidents of their father’s cruel goading of Chap, wondered if Chap didn’t secretly hate Jack. Perhaps Chap simply felt he had to take it because in fact he had abandoned his friend and the expedition just when Jack needed him most.
At some point in the years after he returned from the mountain, Chap wrote a telling yet cryptic postscript in his diary:
Someday I must write the whole story as Jack told it to me—the parting above [Camp] VI, Fritz out of his head, etc. Fritz’s “diary,” Tony’s departure, Jack’s talk with Pasang [Lama], and all the other details Fritz will always deny…
He hadn’t done so by the time he died in 2000, so his explanation and story died with him. On his memorial is written what his family called his motto: “Preach the gospel always. Use words where necessary.”
GEORGE SHELDON, a gifted writer and the team’s official chronicler, sold his expedition story to the Saturday Evening Post and was working for the Kansas City Star when he was drafted into the army during World War II, where he became an espionage expert. He never wrote professionally again. He too never discussed the trip with his children, but both his son and daughter felt a heavy darkness around him whenever the subject came up. He died of lung cancer at his home in Thetford, Vermont, in 1989. He was seventy-one years old.
OLIVER EATON “Tony” Cromwell threatened to resign in protest from the American Alpine Club if it didn’t expel Fritz Wiessner for what Tony considered his near-criminal mistakes as the team’s leader. The club refused, so Cromwell resigned in 1940 and lived much of the rest of his life in Europe. Years after Cromwell’s death in 1987, when asked the whereabouts of the journal he had kept on K2, his grandson replied that “he probably burned it.” John E. Cromwell said his grandfather never spoke to him of the expedition, but he said that there was always a sense of “infamy” around his grandfather having decided it was time to “pull up stakes” and order the camps stripped. While Tony Cromwell never faced charges publicly, there remained in his family an impression of shame and possibly guilt for his part in the ill-fated expedition.
PASANG LAMA, the only other witness to Fritz’s summit assault and the decision to leave Dudley at Camp VII, was also affected long after the expedition. While he had an obvious wealth of information that could have clarified the story, sadly, few asked him to tell his version. One who did, Sir Edmund Hillary, later remarked to Durrance, “I know more about your expedition to K2 than you do,” but the circumstances just then didn’t allow him to elaborate and Durrance never followed up.
In a rare interview with Kurt Maix, co-author of The White Spider with Heinrich Harrer, Pasang called Wiessner “completely crazy! He want we climb whole night. Climb, climb, climb, and he say ‘when dark we at summit.’ I never see someone climb like he. I no see nothing—it night. But Wiessner say ‘it very bright.’ Maybe he see with fingertips. I say ‘I go no further.’ Crazy. No one climb like he.” Maix noted that while Pasang’s words were said with real fear of Wiessner’s ruthless climbing ethic, they were also said with real admiration for Wiessner’s strength and talent. In 1982 and in failing health, Pasa
ng wrote Fritz asking for financial help; Fritz sent him $100.
AS FOR Fritz Hannes Wiessner, the brilliant climber but bullheaded leader who had abandoned his last man on the mountain and then pointed a finger of blame at every other person on the team, he came home to a sea of criticism. Like Cromwell, he resigned from the American Alpine Club shortly after its report was released, but after an ardent campaign in 1966 by two club members he was reinstated as an honorary member.
While Wiessner was able to return from K2 and live a productive, active life into his late eighties (he died of a series of strokes in 1988), many closest to him felt he was forever obsessed, not by the tragedy but by his lost chance at the summit—how close he had gotten, and how if he had been given just one more chance, he could have made history. Ironically, given all that we now know about physical and mental deterioration at high altitude and Wiessner’s own account of his confusion and exhaustion, if he had found the crampons at Camps VIII or VII that he needed for another stab at the summit, the chances of his dying on descent would have been very high. The lost crampons and the stripping of the camps became his excuse to descend and to do so without the burden of an incapacitated Dudley Wolfe. That chain of events—so disappointing at the time—probably saved his life.
It’s doubtful that Wiessner ever had that thought, as he remained forever bitter about his lost summit bid. Of Dudley Wolfe, he almost never spoke again.
Postscript
The World’s Highest Graveyard
Dudley Wolfe’s plaque on the Gilkey Memorial. (Jennifer Jordan / Jeff Rhoads)
Sixty-three years after he was left to die on the mountain, Dudley Francis Wolfe was finally put to rest at its base. It was a far cry from his beloved rocky coast of Maine or the mountains above Zermatt, but at least he had finally made it down off the mountain.
After our discovery of his skeletal remains, Jeff and I all but ran back to base camp, pulled out the satellite phone, and called Charlie Houston in Vermont.
“Jennifer! Tell me, how is my beautiful K2?”
“Well, it’s a different place than when you were here, Charlie. Now it’s littered with a lot of expedition garbage, and with those who have died.”
I chose my words carefully, painfully aware that the body of Art Gilkey, his 1953 teammate, had only recently been found.*
“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” he said after a pause, his voice thick with emotion. “I hate to think of K2 that way; when we were there it was pristine and spectacular.”
“It’s still spectacular, it’s just rather depressing. That’s why I called,” I said, eager to tell him my news. “Charlie, we found Dudley Wolfe. Well, we found his remains.”
Silence greeted my announcement. I allowed my dear friend time to absorb the news.
“Dudley Wolfe. My God, I haven’t thought of him in decades. Where did you find him?”
“On the glacier, about a mile southwest of base camp, almost all the way across the glacier toward Broad Peak.”
“It’s good he can finally be put to rest.” I could hear tears in his voice.
IN THE TRADITION of mountain burials, we hammered a plaque from a tin dinner plate we found in Dudley’s wreckage and fastened it to the memorial that, in 2002, held the names of fifty-two lost climbers.* On it we put the words: “Dudley Wolfe—The first man to die on K2, but not the last.”
IN RESEARCHING this book, I spent years gathering Dudley’s letters, photos, and memorabilia. During this time I had many pleasant conversations and emails with his nephew, Dudley F. Rochester, a retired pulmonary specialist living in Virginia. In one of our exchanges he told me that he had attended an American Lung Association conference in Estes Park, Colorado. At dinner, the conversation turned to high-altitude medicine, given that most of the doctors at the table were struggling with the elevation, having flown in from sea level to the meeting at 7,600 feet. Someone brought up K2, and that it was becoming the deadliest Himalayan peak, and Dr. Dudley Rochester offered, “My uncle died on K2 in 1939.”
The man to his right slowly turned to face him.
“You’re Dudley Wolfe’s nephew?”
“Yes, I’m Dudley Rochester,” he said, offering the man his hand.
The man looked as if he’d been hit by a hammer. After several moments he took Rochester’s hand.
“I’m Jack Durrance,” he said.
Rochester, knowing very little of the particulars of the expedition, smiled and told Jack he knew who he was and that it was an honor to meet him.
“I barely knew my uncle,” Rochester went on, “but he was always something of a mythical figure in our family, a real adventurer type who just pushed the envelope too far on his last journey.”
Durrance seemed to bristle.
“Your uncle died because he was fat and clumsy,” Jack said sharply. “He had no business being up there.”
Rochester thought the comment was a bit odd, but he had no reason to doubt a man who had been there, so he believed it, and years later repeated it to me as his understanding of how his Uncle Dudley had died on K2.
I told him, gently but firmly, that Dudley Wolfe did not die on K2 because he was fat and clumsy, that in fact no one gets to where Dudley did on that mountain without incredible strength, determination, and skill. Did he need help on the ascent? Yes, many climbers do. Did he find the route difficult, demanding, and in parts terrifying? Yes, many climbers do. Was he, at the end of the day, unable to make it down without help? Yes, many climbers are.
No, I told him, Dudley Wolfe died on K2 because he climbed beyond his ability to get back down, and after two months at those extreme altitudes, he needed someone else to help get him down safely. And those who were there were either beyond their capacity or chose not to try.
Either way, Dudley Wolfe died on K2 because he was left there.
If we deserve nothing else, we deserve to be remembered fairly, for our gifts as well as our faults. But Dudley’s written epitaph has been a cartoon of a millionaire out to put his foot on the summit, regardless of the risks. According to his teammates and the expedition’s various chroniclers through the years, he was overconfident, clumsy, fat, slow—the adjectives describe a stereotype, not a man. What is most unfair is that they are almost without exception untrue and unearned.
Dudley Wolfe was a kind, gentle, quiet, unassuming, generous, adventurous soul. His family adored him. His women fell in love with him fast and hard. A loner by nature, he didn’t surround himself with scores of friends and associates, but those he had were close and real. His hard-as-nails ex-wife begged him for reconciliation, writing him the plaintive love letters of a teenage girl. His army buddies wrote fond reminiscences of their wartime adventures in Rome and Paris; his long-lost uncle sent holiday cards and gifts; and his siblings signed their letters “with love, always.”
It was this Dudley Wolfe whom I want history to remember as the first man lost on K2.
Special Thanks
I list the following people in no particular order as each was invaluable as I gathered information about people I had never met, altitudes on K2 I had never reached, prep schools I had never attended, armies in which I had never fought, ski areas I had never schussed, and boats I had never built nor sailed. Writing is indeed a collaborative endeavor and I am indebted to each of the following for making this book as comprehensive and accurate as possible.
THE FAMILIES
Dudley F. Rochester, Cynthia Seefahrt, Joanna Durrance, Charis Durrance, John Durrance, Ada Durrance, Stella Durrance, Polly Wiessner, Andy Wiessner, Jeanie Cranmer Clark, Bruce Cranmer, Betty Cranmer, Allen Cranmer, Forrest Cranmer, Holbrook Mahn Cranmer, George M. Sheldon, Susan Sheldon Cercone, John E. Cromwell, Alisa Storrow, Sidney Howard Urquhart, Maggie Howard, Janice Vaughan Smith Snow, Crocker Snow, Jr., and Zaidee Parkinson
THE MOUNTAINEERS
Charlie Houston, Nazir Sabir, Jeff Rhoads, Jed Williamson, Henry Barber, Steve Roper, Ed Webster, Paul Sibley, Conrad Anker, Hector Ponce de Leon, Ted Wilson
, Dee Molenaar, Charley Mace, Annie Whitehouse, Sandy Hill, Charlotte Fox, and Paula Quenemoen Bowman.
THE SAILORS
Tom Kiley and Rye Kiley, Jonathan Webber, John Keyes, George Keyes, Ann Montgomery, and the staff of the Camden Yacht Club.
THE FELLOW RESEARCHERS
Dr. Hans Joachim Maitre, Hannah Townsend, and Kasey Morrison.
And those glorious friends and family who provided a warm bed and delicious meal while on the research trail and those who listened patiently to my theories, stories, updates, and frustrations, on the hiking trail, over endless emails and at the kitchen counter: Alice Webber, Muffy Ferro, Geralyn White Dreyfous, Jenny Mackenzie, Ronna Cohen, Becky Hall and Charley Mace, Chub and Nicole Whitten, Marcie Saganov and Susan McClure, Charlotte Fox, Laura and Paul Bruck, Nancy and Charlie Gear, my editor Star Lawrence, my copyeditor Allegra Huston, my agent Jill Kneerim, and always, patiently, and “with love in his heart,” Jeff Rhoads.
The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 Page 24