The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2
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† Literally, “peace,” salaam is the Arabic and Urdu version of “Have a good day.”
* The Zoji is one of the oldest passes of the fabled Silk Road which connected Kashmir, Ladakh, Baltistan, Tibet, and the Kashgar region of central Asia.
* “Glory to the Heights!” In short order the German salutation became the expedition’s unofficial slogan, with the men using it to close many of their letters home as well as notes to each other on the mountain.
* After two expeditions to K2 and chronicling countless examples of bad base camp behavior from high-altitude climbers, the author has developed a theory. When the body detects even the slightest reduction in sufficient oxygen, the brain starts pumping a flood of different hormones, among them estrogen, one of the strongest life-sustaining hormones. That much is fact. Now, here comes the theory: Every woman has at least a small amount of testosterone and every man has a small amount of estrogen. Therefore, when men go to high altitudes perhaps they endure their first onset of estrogen-induced emotionality, or PMS. While the theory is entirely the author’s, medical and high-altitude experts became fascinated with the hypothesis and NASA is taking it into consideration as it designs the SpaceLab for extended exploration through the solar system.
* $1,500 today.
* Crowley would be one of the first high-altitude explorers to properly identify cerebral edema as one of the maladies afflicting climbers above 20,000 feet.
* While it is often thought that the mountains of northern India (now Pakistan) are too far from the Indian Ocean to suffer monsoon-like amounts of moisture, for over one hundred years expeditions have reported storms of seven to ten days with snow totals measured in feet, not inches. In short, monsoon weather.
* Jack Durrance, diary entry, June 19, 1939.
† Years later, Chap would be diagnosed with celiac sprue, a genetic disorder that sets off an autoimmune response when certain types of gluten are eaten, resulting in damage to the small intestine. This, in turn, causes the small intestine to lose its ability to absorb the nutrients found in food, leading to malnutrition and a variety of other complications. Given the wheat-heavy diet on the expedition, Chap would continually fight sickness. As a result of his chronic malnutrition, both before and on the expedition, at five feet nine inches Chap’s weight fluctuated from a high of 140 down to a low of 110 pounds.
* George Sheldon, diary entry, June 3, 1939.
* Houston later diagnosed Petzoldt’s illness as the mosquito-borne dengue fever.
* On approach march, their ninth Sherpa, Pemba Kitar, had taken ill with pneumonia and was sent back to Skardu to recover and return with a doctor’s note assuring that he was fit for work. He returned on June 28, but he was still weak and without a note. He left for good two days later. The team was therefore down to eight climbing Sherpas.
* It was this serac that broke off in great chunks in 2008, killing eleven climbers who were swept off the route in a series of ice and rock avalanches.
* While an Italian team became the first to summit K2 in 1954, they did so with supplemental oxygen. It wouldn’t be until 1978 that two American climbers made the summit without it.
* From Fritz Wiessner’s notes for his biography.
* Fritz wrote in his diary that he expected to find crampons in Camp VIII. However, when Charlie Houston was asked whether the high camps typically would be provisioned with extra crampons, he responded, “Unlikely. We didn’t have extra crampons in those days. Every man had his one pair and that was it.” Therefore, it seems that Fritz was counting on taking another climber’s crampons for his summit bid, leaving the man to descend the mountain without them.
* Fritz Wiessner, diary entry, July 22, 1939.
* Letter from Lt. George “Joe” Trench to Clifford Smith, May 16, 1940.
* It is unclear exactly when Wiessner entered the events into his diary. Trench mentioned he didn’t keep a daily journal and Chap Cranmer commented in his diary that “Fritz didn’t keep a journal so he wasn’t clear on what happened what days.”
* By the time Wiessner submitted his final draft to the American Alpine Club, he had inserted a brief mention of a “fall above Camp VII” but gave no details of how or when it occurred.
† Wiessner kept a log of the movement of the team and its gear on the mountain, but several of the expedition members noted that he didn’t keep a diary while on the mountain. The diary he submitted for later perusal was a small flip-style notebook of the same type as his gear logs, with pages ripped out, lost or destroyed, and the dates penciled in. It’s impossible to determine if the journal was written at the time of the expedition or later.
* Like a lot of the original documentation from the expedition and ensuing inquiry, Cromwell’s letter either disappeared or was destroyed; either way, it has not been seen publicly for over seventy years.
* The first death was E. Francis Farmer, a businessman from Manhattan with no mountain experience who nonetheless set out in 1929 to explore the foothills of Kangchenjunga, the world’s third highest mountain and one of its deadliest. He was last spotted by his porters on or near the summit, but he never returned. If he had reached the top and made it back alive, his feat would have changed the course of Himalayan climbing and forever set the standard for ascending an 8,000-meter peak, as he did it alone and without oxygen or support of any kind. It would be another fifty years before a similar feat was recorded at that height in the Himalayas.
* Fritz Wiessner’s expedition log.
* Personal correspondence from Reid to Weissner, 1938.
* These and other depositions taken by Clifford Smith and Herbert Connell between October 1939 and February 1940 are quoted verbatim.
* It was another peculiar statement, given that food was not the reason for descending nor did it have any bearing on why he left Dudley at Camp VII. But Smith had no way of knowing the intricacies of the expedition or of Wiessner’s fateful descent.
* While the last rolls of film that Dudley shot disappeared, several shot previously at the lower camps had been taken down the mountain and sent home with the mail runners.
* In addition to the wax, the army ordered those same 30,000 troops 150,000 pairs of skis and 200,000 pairs of boots.
* Clifford Smith died in 1964 and so he never learned that Wiessner assumed ownership of Dudley’s prized films. In addition, there are several expedition photographs which have Wiessner credited as the photographer, many of them high on the mountain. While he may indeed have taken the images, there is no record of his ever having operated a camera during the expedition or, in fact, in his entire life. Further, there seems to have been an agreement among the surviving team members to share the expedition’s best photos—including Dudley’s—because each of the Cromwell, Durrance, Sheldon, and Cranmer collections all contain photos in which the owner/photographer appears in one of “his” own photos, indicating that someone else took the image. Several of these include photos in which Sheldon, Durrance, and Cranmer all appear; these were most probably taken by Dudley Wolfe, including the one on the cover of this book.
* Chap Cranmer’s family, grateful to Jack for having saved their son’s life, paid for his medical education at the Waring Institute at the University of Colorado in Denver.
* Gilkey, a handsome, fun-loving member of Charlie’s 1953 K2 team, had suddenly been stricken with phlebitis, or blood clots, high on the mountain. A potentially fatal diagnosis at sea level, at 26,000 feet they are a death sentence. Still, Charlie and the team rallied to carry Gilkey down on an improvised stretcher. As they navigated a steep, icy slope below Camp VIII (very close to where Dudley, Fritz, and Pasang had fallen), one of the men slipped, pulling the entire party off their feet. In one of Himalayan climbing’s most heroic and miraculous moments, Pete Schoening saw what was happening below him and was able to dig his ice axe into a rock before the weight of five men and a gurney came onto the rope at his waist. Incredibly, he held on, and the rope didn’t break. Each man survived, although some
, including Charlie, were severely injured. As they picked themselves up, Gilkey in the stretcher was left anchored on the slope while the other men quickly put up a couple of tents to tend to the injured. When they went back to the slope for Gilkey, he was gone, most likely swept off the slope by an avalanche. As the men descended the mountain in the morning, they climbed down through a bloodstained trail—so horrific a scene many had no memory of it until years later. Before they left base camp, they erected a stone monument to Art. The Gilkey Memorial stands to this day and now bears the names of seventy-eight other fallen climbers.
* As of the end of the 2009 climbing season in mid-August, the number of climbers who lost their lives on K2 stood at seventy-eight.