K2

by Ed Viesturs

  Yet 7:00 P.M. came and went with no radio call from the summit pair. Granted, I had never formed any close friendships with the Russians, and Vlad had really ticked me off with his every-man-for-himself philosophy. That day, however, I couldn’t help but worry about what was going on high on K2, as I silently pleaded with the mountain gods to be kind to those two determined climbers. We all tried to send positive energy their way.

  Finally we found out what had happened. Vlad and Gnady had left Camp IV, pitched on the Shoulder at 26,000 feet, at 3:00 A.M. Hindered by deep snow, they had climbed agonizingly slowly, but they’d refused to turn around. They’d reached the summit together at 9:00 P.M., after eighteen hours of climbing.

  When I found this out, I was astounded and disturbed. In my book, eighteen hours was far too long to keep going for the summit, and 9:00 P.M. was far too late to get there. But these were really tough guys. Did I think I could climb any faster? On my own summit attempt, what could I do differently? “Should we leave CIV @ 8 P.M.?” I mused in my diary. “Gonna be a bitch!”

  That night, Gnady made it down to Camp IV, but Vlad bivouacked, exhausted, below the summit. Remarkably, he not only survived the night but suffered no frostbite. The two Russians descended all the way to base camp on August 3.

  Meanwhile, on August 2, Thor, Chantal, and Alex had climbed to the Shoulder and set up their own camp at 26,000 feet. Their plan was to go for the summit in the morning.

  The same day they made their attempt, August 3, Scott and I finally launched our own summit bid. At last, all our hard work on the mountain was paying dividends. To save time and take advantage of the good weather, we climbed 7,500 vertical feet, from base all the way to Camp III, in a single sustained push. It took me only eleven hours to make that monumental ascent, Scott a few hours longer. In terms of sheer efficiency of movement, that day remains one of the best I have ever had in the mountains.

  As we climbed, of course, we had no idea what was going on with our three teammates above. At Camp III, we listened to the 7:00 P.M. radio call, but there was no word of their progress. In those days it was not unusual not to make any calls during a summit push, because you were so caught up in the effort of climbing or hadn’t even bothered to carry the bulky radio with you. Our only option was to keep the radio on and wait for word from the summit trio.

  As you climb the Abruzzi Ridge, for thousands of feet the summit pyramid is out of sight, eclipsed by the cliffs and slopes above you. It’s only when you reach the Shoulder, at 26,000 feet, that the majestic upper sweep of the mountain suddenly bursts into view.

  Caught up as we were in our own great day of climbing, Scott and I didn’t give much thought to Thor, Chantal, and Alex. They were experienced climbers who ought to be able to take care of themselves. Inside our sleeping bags at Camp III, Scott and I were wired and exuberant. The next day we would push on to Camp IV. If the weather held, we would go for the top on August 5.

  We were too excited to get to sleep at first. Instead, we just tossed and turned in our bags. And then, at 10:00 P.M., we heard the crackle of our radio. I sat up, turned on my headlamp, grabbed the walkie-talkie, and answered the call.

  It was Thor, transmitting from Camp IV. “Hey, guys,” he said. I could hear the tension in his voice. “Chantal and Alex aren’t back. I don’t know where they are.”

  Oh, shit! I said to myself. In the headlamp beam, I looked at Scott. He had the same look of disgust and concern on his face. There goes our summit try, I thought.

  Thor and Alex, it turned out, had left Camp IV at 5:30 that morning. Chantal hadn’t gotten off until 7:00. But then, even though she was climbing without bottled oxygen, she caught up with the two guys in the Bottleneck and surged past them. It was an extraordinary performance at such an altitude.

  After a long, hard day of climbing, realizing he would reach the summit too late in the day, rather than risking a bivouac, Thor prudently gave up his attempt just a few hundred feet below the top and headed down. As he would learn only the next day, Chantal had pushed on and reached the summit at 5:00 P.M. Alex didn’t top out until 7:00. On the descent, he came across Chantal. Afraid to go down by herself in the dark, she had started to bivouac. Almost berating her, he roused her out of her apathy and convinced her to go down with him.

  At first light on August 4, Scott and I prepared to head up from Camp III. Our summit attempt had been transformed into a rescue mission or, even worse, into a search for missing climbers. But then, at 7:00 A.M., Thor came on the radio again. Alex and Chantal had just arrived, staggering into camp after a descent that had stretched through the whole night. Chantal was completely exhausted, snowblind, and suffering from what she thought was frostbite. Alex had saved her life, but now, as if he felt he had done all that was required of him, the Russian dumped Chantal in Thor’s lap and headed on down the mountain. He barely said good-bye.

  Chantal was still virtually helpless. So, Scott and I realized, it would now be our job to go to her aid. Thor could never get her down to base camp by himself. At least, I thought as I gathered gear for our mission, it was a rescue and not a search.

  That morning, however, everything seemed to conspire against us. By the time Scott and I got going, the visibility had dropped to almost zero, and the snow conditions were really bad. For a couple of hours, barely able to see where we were going, we plowed upward through deep snow, before deciding to call it quits and head back.

  Late that evening, Alex came into sight above Camp III. He was pretty wasted. We climbed up a little way to help him down, got him into a tent, and brewed up lots of drinks, because he was severely dehydrated. It surprised me that at this point, Alex didn’t even seem curious about what was going on with Chantal.

  That same day, Thor had started down from Camp IV, leading Chantal, who could barely see her feet in front of her. Because of the marginal conditions, they got only a short distance before having to stop on the lower edge of the Shoulder. Fortunately, Thor had brought a tent, but the emergency shelter he set up on that precarious slope was more like a bivoauc than a true camp. I could only imagine the monumental task he had taking care of Chantal in such trying circumstances.

  The next day, August 5, Scott and I got up at 4:30 A.M., then waited for a break in the weather to head back up, since the situation above us seemed to be getting more dire by the hour. Alex was too wiped out to help at all; later that day he would head down from Camp III on his own. Finally the weather improved just enough. Scott and I were off at 7:30. There were clouds scudding by, alternating with sunbursts. The snow everywhere was deep and soft.

  By midday, we had reached the last headwall beneath the Shoulder.

  Suddenly we caught sight of Thor and Chantal, two small dots above us flickering in and out of clouds and mist. The wind was blowing steadily in a minor gale, and little spindrift avalanches had started sliding down the headwall.

  Throughout the expedition so far, I had always erred on the side of caution. I’d refused to climb in conditions the Russians seemed to think were worth the risk. I’d headed down when cockier climbers headed up. Now, all at once, I felt that the slope Scott and I were trying to climb was ready to avalanche. Scott hadn’t yet come to the same realization—I attribute that to the fact that I’d done a lot more guiding than he had and had learned to be hypervigilant about avalanche conditions. “Wait a minute, Scott,” I said. “This is not a good slope.”

  It’s an eternal and inevitable fact in mountaineering, as in most dangerous pursuits, that you can get sucked into exceeding the boundaries of your own best judgment of acceptable risk when you go to the rescue of someone else in trouble. The classic example occurred on K2 in 1953, when, trying to save the life of a crippled teammate, seven members of the American expedition came extremely close to dying in one horrible, interlinked fall. That accident had taken place almost exactly where Scott and I now stood.

  Later I would think about the sad fate of Jean-Marc Boivin. One of the finest French climbers of his day,
he was also, during the 1980s, the boldest extreme skier in the world. Boivin performed scores of first ski descents in the Alps, on couloirs and faces where the slightest slip meant certain death. He also perfected the arts of BASE jumping and para-penting (hang gliding with a frameless parachute that unfurls from a pack on your back). In 1988 he electrified the climbing world by jumping off the summit of Everest and parapenting to a lower camp in only twelve minutes.

  In 1990, at the age of thirty-nine, Boivin was starring in a made-for-TV adventure for Ushuaïa, a chic French documentary show about extreme sports. He and a female costar were set to BASE jump off a cliff near Angel Falls, Venezuela—a piece of cake for Boivin. But when the woman, jumping first, hit the cliff glancingly on the way down, Boivin impetuously jumped to go to her aid, without making his usual meticulous preparations. He hit a tree near the bottom of the jump, then lay on the ground, injured. A helicopter flew by to rescue him, but Boivin signaled the pilot to go after his costar first. She survived, miraculously, with only minor injuries. By the time the chopper had returned to gather up Boivin, he had died of internal hemorrhaging. He left behind a wife and small children.

  If we had been climbing only for our own reasons, to get to the Shoulder and establish Camp IV, Scott and I would not have pushed the head-wall in the conditions that now engulfed us. It was the very real possibility that Chantal—and perhaps Thor, as well—might die without our help that drove us to such an extreme and dangerous effort.

  Scott and I were roped together with a fifty-foot line I had scrounged at Camp III. By now, I had a foreboding sense of imminent disaster. “Man,” I said to Scott, “let’s not get ourselves killed doing this.” The slope we were climbing seemed triggered to avalanche at any moment. Scott, who was above me, sat down on the slope, facing out. Almost in a panic, I started digging frantically with my ice ax, trying to excavate a hole I could hunker down in if the avalanche came. My thought was that this pocket in the snow would protect me from the brunt of the blow if the slope cut loose.

  And then, sure enough, it came. Scott never saw it. I had time just to look up and see a wave of snow swallow him before he disappeared from sight. I quickly tucked my head and upper body into my hole, thrust the pick of my ax into the slope, and put all my weight on top of it. The slide took so long to carry Scott down the slope and then past me that I began to think, Wow, I got away with it!

  Then—boom! The rope came tight in a wrenching jolt, and I was plucked out of my little hole like a knife out of butter. I started careening down the slope fifty feet above Scott. There was just enough time for me to anticipate the 8,000-foot fall to the glacier—and to oblivion.

  The instincts born of my years of RMI training clicked in. Arrest! Arrest! my brain screamed. Even as I cartwheeled down the slope, I flipped onto my stomach and got my head uphill, with the ax held in both hands under my chest. I dug and dug with the pick, only to feel it slice through soft snow. Scott, I later learned, had been unable to get in position even to attempt a self-arrest.

  We had probably fallen a couple of hundred feet when all of a sudden my ax bit into some ice and we came to a stop. My self-arrest had finally done the job. I rolled over and yelled out, “Scott, are you okay?”

  I couldn’t have been more relieved by his answer. “Yeah, but my nuts are killing me!” he screamed. If Scott was together enough to complain about his harness jamming his balls, he had to be all right.

  All the same, we had come within inches of taking the big plunge. That was by far the closest brush with death I had experienced in my sixteen years of mountaineering.

  Scott and I pulled ourselves together. I got Thor on the radio and warned him not to come down the slope that had just avalanched. “Go over to your left,” I pleaded, “toward this ice-cliffy area, and maybe rappel.” Then we climbed up, still hoping to guide Thor and Chantal down. Finally, at 25,500 feet, we closed the gap. “Man,” Thor exclaimed, “am I glad to see you guys!”

  We laid Chantal on her back, right there in the snow. I managed to pry her eyelids open and douse her eyes with anesthetic drops. Then we tied in as a rope of four, with Scott going first and myself in the rear as anchor. Late that afternoon, we at last made it down to Camp III. We got Chantal into a sleeping bag. I checked her feet; they weren’t frostbitten, just terribly cold. We melted pot after pot of snow to nurse both Thor and Chantal with hot drinks.

  Throughout the retreat, Chantal never thanked us once. Instead, over and over again, she pealed, “I made the summit! I’m so happy!” It would not be the last time this strong and beautiful Frenchwoman would use up all her reserves getting to the top of an 8,000er only to collapse and depend on other climbers to get her down the mountain.

  Scott and I knew what the rescue had cost us. Our summit attempt was now on indefinite hold. The more pressing duty was to get Chantal, still exhausted, and Thor, in only marginally better shape, safely down the mountain.

  By midnight on August 6, all of us had made it back to base camp in one piece. Scott and I were pretty tired ourselves, but beyond that, we were profoundly disappointed. Any summit attempt we might make would now require a whole new launch out of base camp. Morally, however, we had had absolutely no choice but to abort our summit try to help Thor and Chantal get down the mountain. That’s why I find it so hard to stomach all the accounts in recent years—especially on Everest—of climbers ignoring others in trouble for fear a rescue effort would sabotage their own summit bids.

  The next night, the Russians and Chantal celebrated their victory. Scott and I weren’t invited, so we lay in our own tents listening to their drunken cheers and toasts. That was hard enough to take, but not nearly as hard as the bombshell that exploded in the morning.

  Vlad gathered his “team” in the cooking tent at breakfast. Then he announced that the expedition was over! Everyone on his permit would now have to go home. And as if that edict weren’t severe enough, he decided to insult the rest of us for good measure. We Americans, he announced witheringly, just didn’t climb fast enough. We had wasted our time and weren’t willing to push it.

  I simply stared at Vlad. I was so angry, I couldn’t get a single word out. I couldn’t remember ever being so pissed off at a fellow climber on a mountain. I couldn’t believe that a so-called leader could be so selfish. If we needed any further proof that Vlad, in the end, was a complete jerk, he had just provided it.

  By August 7, Scott and I had been on the mountain for nearly seven weeks. There were five of us on the Russian permit who still dearly wanted another crack at climbing K2. And there was another team still at base camp—Hall & Ball, with their Swedish and Mexican teammates. After so much effort, I wasn’t about to give up just because Vlad had told us to go home.

  Chantal, of course, had ignored the whole permit business after her Swiss team had packed it in. She had climbed the mountain illegally and had apparently gotten away with it. That wasn’t my style, however; I’ve always pretty much played by the rules. And I knew that other climbers who had tried to circumvent permit restrictions had been banned from Pakistan by the Ministry of Tourism.

  Since our leader, Vlad, was leaving, technically our expedition was over and all of us had to leave as well. But, working with Hall & Ball and our liaison officer, we eventually cobbled together an arrangement that allowed us to stay on the mountain. Dan Mazur, one of our five determined to give it another shot, became the nominal leader of what was left of our party.

  Meanwhile, the weather refused to cooperate. Day after day, we saw fierce storms raking the upper slopes of the mountain. Scott and I had left all our gear at Camp III. But now we started to worry that Camp IV, on the Shoulder, could have been buried under new snow or destroyed by the winds that we had seen scouring the upper reaches of the mountain. Instead of counting on the tents and gear left by others at Camp IV, we’d have to pack up Camp III and carry it up to the Shoulder.

  We rested at base camp for four days. I was preoccupied with logistics. On August 10, I wrote
in my diary:

  Scott & I have all of our own stuff @ CIII—tent, bags, fuel, stove, food. Last trip up we ate like sparrows—granola for breakfast, 2 power bars during the day & soup for dinner. We gave up on hot drinks because it took too much time to cook on the Bleuet stove….

  We could do it in 3 days if conditions were right. If not deep snow. Base to CIII, to CIV, to summit. Please give us some good weather!

  It wasn’t until August 11 that the weather cleared. We all decided to head up the mountain the next day. After all our waiting, all our setbacks, all the interpersonal conflicts, I was supermotivated. You can see the tension in my very handwriting in my diary, and in my use of exclamation marks:

  We are going to CIII tomorrow. Scott, me, Gary & Rob will leave here at 2 A.M…. Many will follow. But most of the rest haven’t even been above CII yet! Plus they will carry O’s [bottled oxygen]. It’s gonna be tough for ‘em.

  GET PSYCHED!!

  GO! GO! GO! GO!

  On August 12, Scott and I and Hall & Ball left base camp at 2:00 A.M., planning to climb all the way to Camp III that day. Several others had left the day before and spent the night at Camp II, in hopes of meeting up with us at CIII when we arrived. In the lead all the way, I reached Camp III at noon. I’d climbed those 7,500 feet in ten hours—an hour faster than my great time on August 3. Charley Mace, who had spent the night at Camp II, arrived at 2:30 P.M. Scott didn’t get in until 4:00. Hall & Ball and the rest of their teammates were even slower. From my diary:

  Rob & Gary arrived totally fried-out & hypothermic. Had to set up camp for ‘em & give hot drinks. Mex’s & Swedes showed between 7–8 P.M.! Not a lot of strength here that’s for sure.

  Beautiful clear evening. High hopes for good weather tomorrow.

  But as it turned out, the weather the next morning was decidedly iffy, with lenticular cloud caps covering all the major peaks—almost always a sign of a coming storm. None of us was sure what to do, until Scott and I decided to head up to the Shoulder. We didn’t get off until 9:30 A.M. The others eventually followed us.