K2

by Ed Viesturs

  How sad it is to reflect that that “magic cement” had been so sorely absent in 1939. On the hike in fourteen years earlier, the tension between Durrance and Wiessner had already begun to mount, and the faintheartedness of Sheldon, Cranmer, and Cromwell was already seeping to the surface.

  From Askole, it took the team another nine days to reach base camp. At Urdukas, where the climbers thought they could discern the tent platforms hewn out of the turf by the Duke of the Abruzzi’s party in 1909, they luxuriated in what Craig would describe as “the last grass we would see for two months.” The team’s progress, however, was slowed by threats of porter strikes, which Streather solved only by inspired diplomacy. There was also enough petty stealing—boots and ice axes were the objects most coveted by the pilferers—that the Americans began to assign watches over their camps at night.

  All his life, Dee Molenaar has been a gifted artist and cartographer. On the hike in to K2, he brought along a watercolor kit, and while his teammates lolled on their air mattresses, he painted the surrounding landscape. (Dee’s drawings and maps have been adapted for this book—see pages viii—ix, 217 and the endpapers.) He also paid attention to the character of his teammates, as their quirks and habits slowly revealed themselves. On June 18 he jotted down thumbnail appraisals in his diary. He could not have been more pleased with Houston and Bates:

  Charlie: fine leader, excellent humor and patience, optimistic in most cases.

  Bates: hard worker, cheerful, fine humor, fine organizer, fast walker.

  Dee has never been the type to criticize his teammates, even in the privacy of his diary. What faint hints of criticism he allowed himself were tactfully phrased. Of Pete Schoening, for instance, he wrote, “quiet… extremely cooperative & hardworking around camp, worries about porters somewhat … may tend to make others uneasy due to constant demand for ‘something to do.’”

  On June 20, the team reached base camp and paid off their 180 porters. They would return on August 10. In terms of the calendar, the 1953 team was thus three weeks behind Wiessner’s 1939 entourage, which had reached base camp on May 31. But in allowing fifty-one days before the return of the porters, Houston’s team carved out an almost identical span in which to climb K2 or fail in their attempt. (That fifty-three days had not been long enough in 1939 did not seem to give Houston pause.)

  One reason for the 1953 team’s optimism sprang from the radical improvement mountaineering gear had undergone during the previous decade and a half. Now the climbers had nylon ropes, stretchy and five times stronger than the hemp or manila ropes used in the 1930s. They had rubber-cleated Vibram soles on their boots, instead of the hobnailed leather footgear of the past. Up high, the men sometimes wore rubber boots developed for soldiers in the Korean War. These glorified galoshes provided great insulation, and for a while they became popular on expeditions to really cold mountains. (Climbers started calling them “Mickey Mouse boots” because they looked like the black, oversized feet of the Disney character.) They’re pretty clumsy, though, for purchase on rock, and when you strap crampons to them, they tend to twist off.

  The Seattle firm of Eddie Bauer had custom-made matching red down jackets for the team, many times warmer and lighter than the layers of sweaters the climbers had donned in 1938. (Another link for me to the 1953 team is that within the last two years, Eddie Bauer has become my principal equipment sponsor. That’s sort of fitting, since my first sleeping bag was a green Eddie Bauer model I used on Boy Scout outings.)

  The 1953 team also had state-of-the-art down sleeping bags made in Switzerland, each one a nesting pair, a smaller inner tucked inside the larger outer. They were “always warm,” the men later testified, and their only drawback was that, weighing seven pounds, they were hard to compress and cram inside a pack. Those packs were of a new steel-and-nylon frame design, far superior to the shapeless rucksacks of the 1930s. And this time around, Houston had no objection to bringing scores of pitons, both rock pins and special ice pitons made for the team by a friend of Houston and Bates’s at MIT. (Apparently Houston’s old disdain for “ironmongery” had softened over the years.)

  Probably the most important gear the 1953 team had that the 1938 team had not was several lightweight walkie-talkie radios. Throughout the expedition, the climbers could usually communicate with base camp, and often from one camp to another. (If Wiessner’s party had had such radios, it is possible that the whole tragedy could have been averted. Of course the technology of 1939 had not yet produced lightweight walkie-talkies.) The 1953 team also had a Zenith portable radio at base camp, on which they received the occasional broadcast from as far away as Europe and even, several times, the United States.

  The party planned to use, for the most part, the same campsites they had first established in 1938, although they were leery of Camp III, where the rocks kicked loose from above had torn holes through the tents and nearly hit three of the men. There’s one detail in Houston’s account of camp logistics that I passed right over when I first read K2: The Savage Mountain but that on rereading it now gives me pause. The 1953 team planned to pitch a Camp VIII somewhere on the Shoulder, around 26,000 feet. But then, according to Houston, “somewhere in the rocks less than a thousand feet from the summit we hoped to pitch Camp IX, a small bivouac tent with food for two men for three days.”

  Sorry, Charlie, but that idea sounds a bit odd. Perhaps, though, it derived from how little the team knew about the mountain above 26,000 feet. Evidently, in 1953 the climbers planned not only to follow the arduous 1,500-foot climb up high-angled rock and mixed ground by which Wiessner had made his first attack, but to find a two-man campsite near the top of it! They knew how difficult Wiessner had found those rock bands, and what a good technical climber he was. Why not opt for the Bottleneck and the traverse under the hanging ice cliff? After all, Wiessner had said that if he had had crampons, he could have “practically run” up that couloir on his second attempt.

  In the 1950s, the thinking in the Himalaya and the Karakoram was still bound by a dictum from the 1920s and ‘30s that insisted that camps on 8,000ers had to be placed close together. Just a month before Houston’s team started working its way up the Abruzzi Ridge, Hillary and Tenzing had set out for the summit of Everest from a Camp IX at 27,900 feet. Nobody camps there nowadays; instead, it’s standard practice to go for the top from the South Col, even though, at 26,000 feet, it’s a full 3,000 feet below the summit. Twenty-first-century expeditions place only four camps on Everest, compared to the nine that were used in the 1950s. This certainly makes for longer and harder days, but it drastically reduces the amount of gear that has to be carried high on the mountain just to supply the camps.

  Likewise, on K2, Wiessner’s party had established nine camps. In 1992, we used only four. Nowadays on K2, nobody camps higher than the Shoulder, which is 2,200 feet below the summit.

  The difference between then and now is partly logistical—gear is much lighter today, so loads aren’t so heavy. But it’s mainly psychological. It took a mental breakthrough to realize that a party could climb Everest or K2 with only four camps above base. It’s actually easier in many respects, and safer (fewer camps in precarious places). In 1939, with their amazing push from base camp to Camp VI—6,900 feet gained in one day—Pasang Kikuli and Tsering had proved that such long nonstop hauls were possible for climbers in good shape, even without bottled oxygen. But it would take a while for an economy of campsites to become standard operating procedure.

  June 21 was Molenaar’s thirty-fifth birthday. It was not a happy occasion. He was ill and weak and “wobbly on legs,” as he wrote in his diary. He wondered if he had contracted dengue fever, the malady that had probably been the cause of Petzoldt’s recurrent high fever in 1938. Dee added, “Very homesick this evening, wondering how Lee and Patti [his wife and daughter] are, halfway around the world. Charlie also admits much of the same feeling lately; we’re the only ones with wives and kids.” During the expedition, Dee would often take out his wallet to
look at the photos of Lee and Patti he kept there.

  On June 27, Bates and Houston set out from Camp I, at the base of the Abruzzi, to find the route to Camp II they had pioneered fifteen years earlier. What must at the time have been a mortifying experience, Houston later treated in print as a comedy of errors:

  For the first two hours we climbed steep scree (loose stone) and snow slopes, crossing a few little ribs, exclaiming “I remember this chimney” or “Do you see that cairn? I’m sure we must be on the old route.” …

  By noon we had to confess that we were lost.

  It would take a second effort the next day, and much arguing, to work out the route to the little saddle that Petzoldt had first discovered in 1938, the site of Camp II at 19,300 feet.

  In Bates and Houston’s defense, I have to say that on the lower slopes of the Abruzzi Ridge, the terrain is so ill-defined that the best route is far from obvious. Today, most climbers follow the tattered remnants of old fixed ropes, which stand out like flags in a sea of gray rock and white snow, to solve the route-finding puzzle of the lower slopes.

  At Camp II, the men had a doleful surprise. They found some tins of jam and pemmican, rusty with age, some stoves and a little gas, and “a Logan tent carefully wrapped and sheltered beneath a tarpaulin.” These things had been left when Wiessner and Pasang Lama made their desperate retreat on July 23, 1939. It was here that those two shattered men had wrapped themselves in one tent and lain in the other through a sleepless night, as they felt their fingers and toes begin to freeze. Why they—or someone else—had wrapped the Logan tent and cached it under a tarp remains a mystery, since Wiessner never mentions doing so. Most likely, on his last effort to go up the mountain to look for survivors, on August 4, when he managed only to drag himself to Camp II, Wiessner had folded up and stashed the tent in hopes of yet another rescue effort.

  Despite such minor setbacks as the route-finding snafu, the team was getting along well. “Morale excellent and no frictions in party,” Dee wrote in his diary on June 26. But his homesickness only intensified. “I miss Lee and Patti terribly,” he confessed on July 2. “No more lengthy, bigtime expeditions for me!”

  In 1939, the Dartmouth boys, George Sheldon and Chappell Cranmer, had gotten homesick early on the expedition, and those base camp blues had apparently contributed to the “crump” that left them virtually useless on the mountain. What you have to admire about Dee Molenaar is that despite feeling so down only two weeks after reaching base camp, to the point of vowing never to go on another major expedition (in fact, he would not), on K2, out of commitment to his teammates, he continued to pull every bit of his share of the weight, and to care as much as anyone about trying to get at least two men to the summit. Only a few days after his disconsolate birthday diary entry, Dee led a perilous and poorly protected leftward traverse, much to the admiration of his teammates, who nicknamed it “Molenaar’s Madness.”

  On July 7, the climbers reached the site of the dangerous 1938 Camp III, at 20,700 feet. Intending to use the spot only as a supply depot, as Wiessner wisely had, the climbers were startled when Bates, poking around a corner, found a nook sheltered from falling rocks by an overhanging cliff. It was a major effort to excavate two narrow tent platforms there, but when the men were done, they had a safe and serviceable Camp III. (The brunt of the excavating was done by one of the Hunzas, Hidayat, in “a furious burst of construction.” Like the Sherpa, the Hunzas often perform the most backbreaking work on expeditions, and often the “sahibs” are only too willing to sit back and watch them slave away. And sometimes, at the end of the day, the Hunzas or Sherpa are simply stronger.)

  The next day, the team got more stunning news, via a radio broadcast received at base camp and relayed by walkie-talkie up the mountain. The great Austrian mountaineer Hermann Buhl had just made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth-highest mountain, which in the 1930s had cost the lives of so many Germans, Austrians, and native porters. And Buhl had reached the summit solo!

  The line in Dee’s diary commenting on that achievement is fascinating, because it reflects the suspicion that initially clouded the Austrian’s bold deed. Buhl, Dee wrote, “evidently sneaked off from the rest of the party at 3 A.M.”

  That was the story propagated by the team leader, Dr. Karl Herrligkoffer, who has gone down in mountaineering annals as one of the most autocratic and spiteful expedition dictators in Himalayan history. The true story, which took a long while to emerge, was that Buhl set out from the team’s high camp half an hour ahead of his teammate Otto Kempter, who was feeling weak and having trouble getting started. Buhl intended only to break trail until Kempter could catch up, but his teammate lagged behind and finally gave up. So Buhl went on alone, reaching the summit at 7:00 P.M., enduring a standing bivouac on the way down, and later losing toes to frostbite.

  Herrligkoffer was the classic example of an expedition boss who always led from the rear. Back in Germany, he claimed Buhl had disobeyed his orders; he even sued his Austrian teammate. But today, mountaineers the world over hail Buhl’s ascent as one of the greatest deeds in climbing history.

  I admire Buhl’s audacity on Nanga Parbat, but I also think he was lucky to have a mild enough night to survive his standing bivouac. A deed such as Buhl’s depends on walking the fine line between getting away with a stunning triumph and vanishing in the mists.

  On July 9, the team at last reached Camp IV, just below House’s Chimney. Here the discovery of yet more debris from 1939 also posed an apparent puzzle. Along with what Houston described as “tents reduced to shreds” and various kinds of food, including “a large tin of Ovaltine half used but still in perfect condition after fourteen years,” the climbers found three sleeping bags. They were “frozen and filled with ice,” but the 1953 team eventually thawed them out and used them to supplement their own supply of bedding.

  Those sleeping bags caused Dee to write in his diary, “Our impression was that this was not an ‘evacuated campsite,’ as described since 1939 by Weissner [sic].” That’s a provocative remark; it may ultimately reflect the bad feelings Houston still harbored toward Wiessner. It implies that the team wondered whether Wiessner’s story of his desperate retreat was a lie. If Wiessner claimed he had gone down to camp after camp and found them all stripped of sleeping bags, what were these three bags doing at Camp IV?

  Later Dee came to what was surely the true explanation. The bags must have been left by Pasang Kikuli and his Sherpa companions as they climbed back up the mountain to try to rescue Dudley Wolfe.

  The same day the team reached Camp IV, Houston, Dee Molenaar, and George Bell tackled House’s Chimney. Houston had been thinking about that crux pitch for a decade and a half. He would write in K2: The Savage Mountain, with characteristic self-deprecation:

  During the past ten days I had been mulling over different schemes which would put me in position to try this lead myself without being too obviously unfair to my companions. Now the time had come and I hesitatingly turned to George and Dee, both more competent climbers than I. “Would you fellows mind too much if I tried to lead this?”

  Molenaar and Bell were happy to turn over the “sharp end” to Houston.

  For the first 30 feet I worked on the face, clutching at tiny holds, and trying not to appear too clumsy to the experts below. More by luck and will power than by good technique, I reached the deep cleft, where I huffed and puffed, all the while pretending to get out pitons, adjust the rope, or blow my nose. The upper section was strenuous, though not too difficult. With considerable elation I reached the top finally, and shouted to the others, “Come on up; I’ve got you belayed like a house.”

  That last line was a sly nod to the 1938 partner who had first led the chimney. And Houston’s performance must have been more skillful than he let on, because Dee recorded in his diary that it had taken only an hour to lead the pitch—half the time Wiessner had expended on it in 1939.

  At the old Camp V, only 300 feet above the top of House�
��s Chimney, the three men found more relics from 1939. “Another smashed tent,” wrote Dee, “and letters to Wolfe—including a bill from some laundry outfit back home.”

  One of the delights of Dee’s diary is that it captures—as “official” expedition books rarely do—the homely day-to-day details of life on a big mountain. A few examples:

  Backache again, and slight headache—restless sleep, due possibly to Charlie’s irregular snoring through night.

  Pete, George, and I took loads and set up Gerry tent at IV, lay inside for 3.5 hrs, talking about the Northwest—and exchanging farts.

  Problem here: getting stove started and keeping it upright. Also, obeying nature’s calls. We urinate in peanut can, and toss it out entrance; defecation requires more guts.

  So far, almost everything on the expedition had gone well. The weather had been consistently good, as camps were established and supplies moved steadily up the mountain. Up to Camp III, the Hunzas had performed yeoman work. Houston was tempted to use them higher, but decided against that tactic, on the grounds that the men were simply not experienced enough on difficult terrain. On July 12, as they started back to base camp, the Hunzas parted company for good with the Americans. Wrote Houston later, “Their early cockiness, bred of ignorance, had been succeeded by overcautiousness…. After their initial demoralization at Camp I (and what mountain porters have not gone through this?), they had performed splendidly.” As the Hunzas receded into the distance below Camp III, they shouted out, “America zindabad!” (“Long live America!”) and “Pakistan zindabad!”

  Pete Schoening, the engineer, had designed an aluminum A-frame tripod to which he now attached a pulley. With this device, pulling on ropes fed through the pulley, the men hauled many hundreds of pounds of gear up House’s Chimney. “This was hard work, and time-consuming,” wrote Houston. “But it was nowhere near as hard as carrying loads up the narrow chimney.” In his diary, Dee crowed, “A-frame big success!”