K2

by Ed Viesturs

  At Camp II, Durrance found, in Kauffman and Putnam’s words, “three beaten men surrounded by unwashed pots and pans filled with the remnants of a ‘horrible stew concoction.’ … Rather than touch it, Jack threw it all out.” One of the three was Tony Cromwell, the by now almost useless “deputy leader.”

  At Camp IX, of course, Wiessner was unaware of this breakdown lower on the mountain. On July 19, he and Pasang Lama set out at 9:00 A.M., determined to get to the summit. By today’s standards, that’s pretty late, but in the 1920s and ‘30s, nobody realized that the traditional “Alpine start”—getting off in the wee hours to take advantage of every daylight minute and of the predictably better weather in the morning, a practice regularly observed in the Alps, the Tetons, and the Rockies—might also make sense in the Himalaya and the Karakoram. And given the primitive clothing of the day—sweaters instead of down jackets, wool knickers instead of down pants, single leather boots—an Alpine start on a peak like K2 probably seemed too cold to contemplate. On Everest in both 1922 and 1924, no climber ever got started from a high camp earlier than 6:30 A.M.

  Rather than traverse over to what would later be called the Bottleneck, menaced from above by that huge hanging serac, Wiessner at once tackled the rock cliffs. The amount of gear the two men carried puts our modern lightweight summit attempts to shame. Wiessner hefted a rucksack packed with pitons, carabiners, food, and extra clothing. Pasang Lama carried both men’s pairs of crampons as well as a sturdy “reserve rope,” three-eighths of an inch in diameter and an unimaginable 245 feet in length. The pair tied in with a 115-foot hemp rope that was a solid half inch in diameter—much thicker and heavier than any rope we would use today.

  In light of what happened in August 2008, Wiessner’s avoidance of the Bottleneck looks like pretty canny mountaineering judgment. I suspect, though, that he was simply a lot more comfortable on rock than on snow and ice. As a teenager in Dresden, Wiessner had been part of a gang that put up what at the time were the hardest pure rock climbs in the world (though it would be decades before those men knew it). In the 1920s in the Alps, Wiessner’s two great first ascents, on the Fleischbank and the Furchetta, involved much more rock climbing than ice work. On the other hand, Mount Waddington, in British Columbia, of which Wiessner and Bill House made the first ascent in 1936, is a heavily glaciated mountain, some of whose hardest pitches are on “mixed ground”—rock interspersed with ice.

  Even so, Wiessner evidently underestimated the difficulty of those rock bands. No one since 1939 has ever climbed them again, so it is impossible to give them an objective rating of difficulty. For nine hours, Wiessner climbed the rock bands, hammering in pitons as he went. Lama belayed him on every pitch. In succession, Wiessner mastered a short couloir of black ice, a short overhang of iced-up rock, and many rope lengths of shattered, friable rock, much of it covered with a treacherous skin of ice called verglas. In the face of several unclimbable obstacles he backed off, traversing right or left to find the way. The climbing was so difficult that Wiessner often had to take off his mittens to seize holds bare-handed; but the air was so calm and the temperature warm enough that he didn’t risk frostbite.

  Some of the pitches Wiessner later rated as sixth class—as hard as anything that had yet been done in the Alps. All this above 26,000 feet, without bottled oxygen! The climbing on those rock bands was harder by far than anything yet attempted on Everest, Kangchenjunga, or Nanga Parbat. It was harder by far than House’s Chimney or the Black Pyramid. It’s not easy to judge other people’s climbs, but I’d venture to say that nothing of comparable difficulty at such an altitude would be performed by anybody during the next nineteen years, until Walter Bonatti and Carlo Mauri’s brilliant first ascent of Gasherbrum IV in 1958.

  At 6:30 P.M., with the sun nearing the horizon, Wiessner faced only an easy 25-foot traverse to the summit snowfield. He had reached 27,500 feet, only 750 feet below the summit. The snowfield promised relatively nontechnical climbing. K2 was in the bag.

  But as he started to move on, Wiessner felt the rope come tight. He looked down. Pasang Lama smiled almost apologetically. “No, sahib, tomorrow,” he said. As a Buddhist lama, Pasang believed that evil spirits hovered about the summit of K2 at night.

  For a few moments, Wiessner contemplated unroping and going for the top solo. None of the highest mountains in the world had ever been climbed solo, let alone on a push through the night. But the weather was holding perfect, and a nearly full moon would illuminate the darkness.

  Yet he could not abandon his partner. With a heavy heart, Wiessner turned back. He knew, however, that he and Lama had enough gear and food at Camp IX to make a second attempt the next day or the day after. As he had climbed the rock bands, Wiessner had studied the couloir and the ice cliff to the right. The Bottleneck (as it would later be named) now looked well within his capabilities, and the hanging serac seemed more stable than he had initially thought. On the next try, Wiessner would tackle that route, almost all of which was on snow and ice. It was bound to be easier than the 1,500 feet of mixed ground and rock cliffs he had so expertly solved on this first attempt.

  Slowly, as night fell, the men rappeled down the complicated route, using pitons Wiessner pounded into the rock for anchors. “Many times during that descent,” he later wrote, “I regretted intensely that I had not insisted on continuing over that last traverse.”

  Wiessner’s admirers over the years have argued that if anybody could have pushed on to the summit, reached it after dark, and descended by moonlight, it would have been he. But I disagree. If Wiessner had gone on with Pasang Lama, I think it could very well have turned into another Mallory and Irvine—two incredibly bold and determined climbers vanishing in the mists. If Wiessner had gone on alone, I don’t think he would have survived. And left alone on a small ledge at 27,500 feet, unable to descend on his own, Pasang Lama would surely have frozen to death. In turning back, Wiessner made the right decision. And in refusing to abandon his partner, he did the morally responsible thing. I admire him more for that than if he had reached the summit.

  Even in the gathering night, the conditions were remarkably benign. It was windless, and at 27,000 feet Wiessner estimated the temperature to be between 23 and 27 degrees Fahrenheit. But the descent was difficult, requiring numerous rappels. (Although Wiessner never explained how the two men negotiated the terrain on the way down, I imagine that their very long “reserve rope” came in handy.) Pasang Lama was far less experienced at this sort of thing than Wiessner, and both men must have been pretty tired. As the Sherpa rappelled down an overhang, the rope running across his back got snagged on the crampons he carried strapped to the outside of his pack. With a furious effort, Lama disentangled the rope, but in the process he dislodged both pairs of crampons. Wiessner watched in dismay as these precious pieces of footgear tumbled into the void. That fluke mishap would make a huge difference during the following days.

  The two men reached Camp IX at 2:30 A.M. They had been going for almost eighteen hours straight. To have descended 1,500 feet of difficult ground in the dark without an accident was an extraordinary achievement in its own right.

  Wiessner and Lama slept late and took a rest day on July 20. The two men were mildly disappointed that none of the support party had arrived at Camp IX, but Wiessner did not yet suspect any serious disruption of his logistical pyramid. It was so warm in camp that for hours, Wiessner lay naked on top of his sleeping bag, taking what he quaintly called a “sun bath.” Unfazed by his setback on July 19, he was eager to make a second attempt the following day. In his 1956 account, Wiessner implied that Lama was equally psyched: “At three o’clock we felt fresh again, so that we decided to go to the summit the next day by the easterly route. I had no doubt of our success.” But only two paragraphs later he confessed, “Since the day before [Pasang Lama] had no longer been his old self; he had been living in great fear of the evil spirits, constantly murmuring prayers, and had lost his appetite.”

  On July 21, th
e two men got off at 6:00 A.M., a much better start than they had managed two days earlier. Nowadays nearly everyone pitches a Camp IV somewhere directly on the Shoulder. From there the approach to the Bottleneck is a straightforward matter of climbing up the gradually steepening slope. From Wiessner’s Camp IX, however, a tricky right-ward traverse across the base of the rock bands was the first order of business. If a pair of men are climbing straight up, the leader can safely belay the second simply by taking in the rope. On a traverse, belaying is a much more delicate task. If Lama, coming second, had fallen off, he would have taken a wicked pendulum before the rope came tight to Wiessner. So, as he led, Wiessner had to place pitons at the more difficult moves simply to shorten the length of a potential fall for Pasang Lama. The traverse took a long time, and Wiessner described it in his diary as “disagreeable,” “difficult,” and “treacherous.”

  It was still morning, however, when the two men reached the bottom of the Bottleneck. The snow here was so hard-crusted that Wiessner could not kick steps in it. All at once the significance of the loss of the crampons came home to him. As he later wrote, “With crampons, we could have practically run up [the couloir], but as it was we would have had to cut 300 or 400 steps. At these heights that would have taken more than a day.” Recognizing the futility of the task, Wiessner and the loyal Sherpa turned back to Camp IX once more.

  When they arrived at the tent to find that still no teammates had come up, Wiessner began at last to suspect that something had gone wrong. Even so, he felt that there was still a good chance of climbing K2. Among the supplies being ferried up the mountain were spare pairs of crampons. And the weather was holding perfect.

  On July 22, the two men headed down to Camp VIII. Wiessner’s plan was to pick up more food and gas and the all-important extra crampons, then return to Camp IX. If no crampons had arrived, Wiessner reasoned, he could borrow Wolfe’s to lead the hard pitches up high, then drag his partner up on a tight rope.

  Pasang Lama had had enough of the climb, however, and begged to be replaced in the summit team by someone else. Wiessner thought that Wolfe ought to be equal to the task, or perhaps even Jack Durrance, if he had at last overcome his altitude problems. Weissner was so certain of his return to Camp IX that he left his sleeping bag there, while Lama carried his own down. Here the wisdom of Wiessner’s logistical scheme seemed to pay its dividends in flexibility. On most Himalayan expeditions to that date, each climber had carried his own single sleeping bag up and down the mountain. But by insisting on stocking each camp with sleeping bags, Wiessner made it possible, in theory, for the men to shuttle between camps at will with only light loads.

  On the steeper slopes above Camp VIII, the loss of the crampons again exacted its toll, for here Pasang Lama took a fall. Wiessner described the accident in 1984:

  Pasang was behind me. I should have had him in front, but then I would have had to explain to him how to cut steps. I had just got my axe ready to make a few scrapes, when suddenly he fell off. I noticed immediately, because he made a funny little noise. I put myself in position, dug in as much as possible, and held him on the rope. If I hadn’t been in good shape, hadn’t climbed all those 4000-meter peaks in the Alps, I wouldn’t have had the technique to hold him.

  This account makes Wiessner’s belay sound almost routine, but it was a remarkable feat. Even though they were roped close together, Lama fell, out of control, down to his partner’s level and an equal distance beyond before the rope came tight with a sudden jolt. Many pairs of climbers the world over have been swept to their deaths in just such an accident.

  Arriving at Camp VIII, Wiessner received a bad shock: no one had come up from below. Only Dudley Wolfe was there. The man was overjoyed to see Wiessner but was furious at his laggard teammates lower on the mountain. “Those bastards haven’t come yet,” he said. Wolfe had run out of matches two days before, and the only water he had drunk was a small pool of snowmelt that he had gathered on a fold of the tent.

  “I cannot understand,” Wiessner wrote in his diary, “why our Sherpas, [who] had definitely promised to stock up Camp VIII, had not come. I also wondered where was Jack.”

  Despite a growing sense of alarm, Wiessner was still optimistic. Camp VII, a mere 600 feet lower, had been bountifully stocked even before the team of five had pushed on to establish Camp VIII on July 14. Surely at Camp VII the men could pick up food and fuel and spare crampons, then head back to Camp IX for yet another summit bid.

  After cooking a hot lunch and “celebrat[ing] our reunion,” as Wiessner later put it, the three men headed down. Wolfe carried his sleeping bag with him, as did Pasang Lama. For the first time in days, a light fog had crept in. At first, the trio roped up, with Lama going first, Wolfe in the middle, and Wiessner taking up the rear. On a descent of moderate terrain, it was standard practice for the most experienced man to come last, so that he could belay a partner who might slip. But in the fog, Lama kept losing his way, veering too far to the east. (This was exactly what Scott had tended to do as he led our three-man rope down from the summit in 1992.) So Wiessner switched the order, putting himself in the lead and Lama in the rear.

  It was here that Wolfe’s clumsiness nearly cost all three men their lives. As Wiessner paused in a precarious position, leaning forward to chop a step below his feet, Wolfe accidentally stepped on the rope. The sudden jerk pulled Wiessner off his stance, and he started sliding down the steep slope.

  In 1984, Wiessner gave a vivid account of this near catastrophe:

  I immediately called back, “Check me! Check me!” Nothing happened. Then the rope came tight to Dudley, and he was pulled off. The rope tightened to Pasang behind, and he too came off. We were all three sliding down, and I got going very fast and somersaulted.

  I had no fear. All I was thinking was, how stupid this has to happen like this. Here we are, we can still do the mountain, and we have to lose out in this silly way and get killed forever….

  But getting pulled around by the somersault and being first on the rope, it gave me a little time. I still had my ice axe—I always keep a sling around my wrist—and just in that moment the snow got a little softer. I had my axe ready and worked very hard with it. With my left hand I got hold of the rope, and eventually I got a stance, kicked in quickly, and leaned against the axe. Then, bang! A fantastic pull came. I was holding it well, but it tore me down. But at that time I was a fantastically strong man—if I had a third of it today I would be very happy. I stood there and I wanted to stop that thing. I must have done everything right, and the luck was there, too.

  In the K2 annals—or, for that matter in the history of climbing in the Himalaya or the Karakoram—only Pete Schoening’s “miracle belay” in 1953 is more legendary than Wiessner’s self-arrest, which saved himself and his two teammates. I’d managed a similar self-arrest in 1992, after Scott got avalanched off and pulled me with him. That was tough enough, but there were only two of us on the rope, not three. And as big as he was, Scott was not as heavy as Dudley Wolfe.

  As they approached Camp VII, the shaken men called down to the comrades they presumed were there, but they got no answer. It was dark by the time they arrived. And here the shock became incomprehensible.

  Not only were there no teammates installed in Camp VII; the tents sagged, with their doors open. One was full of snow, the other half-collapsed. All the sleeping bags and air mattresses were gone. What was left of the food had been scattered wantonly in the snow outside the tents. It was as if the camp had been attacked by vandals. Wrote Wiessner in his diary, “What had been going on during the days when we were high—sabotage? We could not understand.”

  Stunned and exhausted, the men cleaned out one tent, repitched it, and crawled inside. In the fall coming down from Camp VIII, Wolfe had lost his sleeping bag. That night the three men shared Pasang Lama’s single bag and air mattress. They endured a sleepless vigil that, as Wiessner wrote seventeen years later, “we shall never forget.”

  It is a testament to
Wiessner’s indomitable spirit that even after that wretched night, he still planned to go back up the mountain and make a third summit attempt. Surely there would be food and sleeping bags at Camp VI, and Wiessner calculated that there should be at least six Sherpa there as well. In the morning Pasang Lama and Wiessner got ready to go. Wolfe had decided to stay at Camp VII. Wiessner later explained the trio’s rationale:

  With only one sleeping-bag we could not stay here in Camp VII, so we decided to go to Camp VI and fetch sleeping-bags from there. One of us, to be sure, could remain up here with Pasang’s sleeping-bag, get a rest, and so spare himself the trip down and up. Wolfe suggested that he stay, to recover from the unpleasant night and be in better shape to take a load to Camp VIII the day after tomorrow. As leader of the expedition I, myself, had to go down to Camp VI to get the support operations going again and find the explanation of the unheard-of occurrences. Pasang was to be relieved.

  Later, Wiessner’s harshest critics would accuse him of abandoning Dudley Wolfe. Even Kauffman and Putnam, looking back from their vantage point of fifty-three years of hindsight, castigate Wiessner on this question:

  The decision now made was to be the major cause of the ensuing tragedy. Fritz split his small party….