K2

by Ed Viesturs

  Now, however, the weather changed. Beginning on July 14, it stormed on seven of the next eleven days. Houston figured the inevitable delays put the team about a week behind schedule. But the men’s spirits plunged with the weather. “Gone were most of the jokes; the banter had become more serious,” remembered Houston. “We were more determined now than ever, but the picnic was over; the true struggle had begun.”

  It’s always true on expeditions that when you’re stuck in a tent with nothing to do, your thoughts turn to food. Houston wittily recaptured those stormbound vigils:

  We read, we slept. Dinners had become real occasions, because our appetites were still good (they were to fail higher up) and considerable ingenuity was usually exercised by the cook. Sometimes he added Triscuits to the boiled meat bars, or fried raisins to the chicken. Sometimes we had oyster stew (minus the oysters) by mixing Klim, butter, salt, and tuna fish…. Bates and I had noticed recently that our companions, heartily sick of our everlasting reminiscences [of 1938], were now again showing interest in these memories, particularly when they involved some of the epicurean dishes then conceived.

  I was amused to discover in Dee’s diary that everybody’s favorite dessert was Jell-O. I haven’t taken Jell-O on an expedition since my attempt on the east face of Everest in 1988. There, instead of following the directions on the package, to get a quick gut-bomb of energy, we would mix Jell-O or pudding powder with water in a quart bottle and slug the liquid down before it set. Jell-O may be a great treat for kids, but it’s insipidly bland at 20,000 feet, and waiting for it to firm up seems to take an eternity.

  On July 20, between storms, Bates and Schoening reconnoitered higher and reached Camp VI. There they discovered the most poignant of all the vestiges of the 1939 expedition. Houston described the scene: “Two tents had been torn to shreds. A stove, gasoline, and sleeping bags, rolled and ready to be strapped to the carrying frames, lay nearby. A small bundle of tea wrapped in a handkerchief lay inside an empty stove box beneath the snow.”

  On July 31, 1939, Pasang Kikuli, Phinsoo, and Kitar had set out from Camp VI on their second attempt to rescue Dudley Wolfe, leaving Tsering to brew up tea. The sleeping bags had evidently been rolled up in anticipation of five men descending the Abruzzi Ridge. Instead, only Tsering returned.

  Pasang Kikuli and Phinsoo had become Houston’s dear friends on the 1938 expedition. Fifteen years later, he saluted them and Kitar movingly: “Whatever their fate, the history of climbing has no braver story, no more generous chapter than theirs. Their sleeping bags, and the pathetic bundle of tea, were sad reminders of their courage.”

  On July 25, Houston, Craig, and Bell attacked the Black Pyramid. Bell led most of the way, across deceptively tricky terrain: “The rock was solid, steep, polished by icefalls through ages past. The holds were small for hands and feet, and often choked with ice.” But, according to Houston, “Bell was in his element here.” In 1992 we found the Black Pyramid a challenging and exciting break from the rather ill-defined route work leading up to it. The climbing’s not extremely difficult, but until we got it fixed with ropes we were constantly aware of just how exposed it is.

  Unlike 1939, when Wiessner, the only strong climber, led virtually every step of the route, in 1953 all eight men—even Tony Streather—took turns advancing the team’s push up the Abruzzi Ridge. That goes a long way toward explaining why those men bonded together so harmoniously, and so loyally. I’ve had my own solid partnerships on 8,000ers, with guys like Veikka Gustafsson and J.-C. Lafaille, but I’ve only rarely been on an expedition in which as many as eight teammates worked together so smoothly. That’s an ideal that many teams aspire to but few achieve.

  Camp VII was pitched on a narrow platform hacked out of a steep snow slope at 24,500 feet. It was so marginal a site that on the way up the Abruzzi, only one pair of climbers spent a single night there. But on July 31, during a cold, windy day, Schoening and Gilkey broke through and found a spot for Camp VIII. At 25,500 feet, it was 800 feet higher than the highest camp in 1938.

  All the way through the Black Pyramid and up to the lower edge of the Shoulder, the men placed willow wands every 50 feet or so to mark their route—as I did in 1992, but as no one bothered to in 1986 or 2008, an oversight that contributed to both tragedies. Arriving after a tough push through whiteout conditions on August 2, Bates and Streather found their way to Camp VIII. The first thing Bates said to his teammates was “Thank God for your willow wands. We had no idea where your camp was and couldn’t see a thing. Your tracks were completely gone above the ice steps.”

  By August 3, all eight climbers were ensconced in their tents at Camp VIII. (“Some kind of record for an expedition,” Dee speculated in his diary.) Houston later recalled, “Morale was magnificent. We were in striking distance of the goal. The summit might still be ours.”

  The entries in Dee’s diary are not so sanguine. The weather during the last ten days had been remarkably cold. Bates and Houston kept remarking on how much colder it was than during the corresponding weeks in 1938. Korean boots or no, most of the climbers had felt the nip of incipient frostbite on their feet. As early as July 25, Dee wrote, “Our experience with frostbite also indicates (happily) that we are thinking more of our fingers and toes than of reaching the summit. Perhaps the altitude is affecting our will to push high at any price.” A few days later: “Worried about toes. Craig’s are turning white.” Soon Dee was deeply ambivalent. “I feel alternately strong,” he wrote on July 31, “with good ‘eager’ days, and then I lose my appetite for taking chances with the weather and personally going much higher—willing now to be in support role rather than attaining the summit myself.”

  Three days earlier, he had voiced an apprehension in his diary that would prove uncannily prescient: “Bringing an injured man down from K2 would be an extremely difficult, if not impossible, task.”

  On July 31, Dee once more jotted down thumbnail impressions of his teammates and their current states of mind and body. “Charlie continues to push ahead as leader,” he wrote, “although I feel he may push himself too hard at times…. Gilkey is strong and quiet, probably the only one who really wants the summit badly enough to take a few risks—wants us all to make it to the top.”

  By August 3, however, the team was reconciled to the likelihood that only two men might get a chance to go for the summit. So, democratic to the end, they held a secret ballot. George Bell and Bob Craig were chosen for the first summit team, Pete Schoening and Art Gilkey for the second.

  The men kept telling one another that all they needed was three consecutive clear days to give the summit their best shot. But that day a storm swept in over the Karakoram. It lasted for seven straight days. The men sat in their tents, trying to stay warm, burning their precious fuel, and eating their dwindling rations. Houston later recalled the tedium of that vigil:

  Someone tightened the guy ropes on all tents. When we could melt snow, someone had strength to clean and fill the pots, and someone else took tea to those in the other tents. Bob Bates read aloud to us for hours. Dee Molenaar painted. We all wrote diaries; my own was now over 200 pages long.

  On August 6, the wind grew so strong that Houston and Bell’s tent started to rip apart in the night. The two men gathered up their belongings, waited for a lull, then made a dash for the other tents. Houston threw himself into one shelter, Bell into another. This meant that two of the team’s remaining three tents, designed for two men each, had to hold three.

  Day by day, the men watched their hopes for the summit slip through their fingers. And then August 7 brought the unforeseeable event that would cancel those hopes completely—and turn the expedition into a survival ordeal.

  That day began with optimism, as the clouds rose, the sky grew brighter, and the wind diminished. But as Houston would later write,

  We crawled from our tents and stumbled around like castaways first reaching shore. As Art Gilkey crawled out to join us, he collapsed unconscious in the snow. We rushed to him a
nd he smiled feebly. “I’m all right, fellows; it’s just my leg, that’s all.”

  His teammates half-carried Gilkey back into his tent. They undressed him so that Houston, the team doctor, could examine the leg. “I’ve had this Charley horse for a couple of days now,” Gilkey said, almost apologetically. “I thought it would be gone by now.”

  Indeed, Dee’s diary for August 2, five days earlier, as the men had pushed up to Camp VIII, notes,

  Craig and I roped together with Art during climb up ice slope, but Art, at lower end of rope, complained of a “Charley horse,” untied to keep from slowing us down. But he kept up with us, following the dragged end of the rope up the slope to VIII.

  Houston knew at once that Gilkey’s ailment was no Charley horse. The man’s left ankle was red and swollen. “The diagnosis was all too clear,” Houston recalled. “Art had developed thrombophlebitis.”

  That diagnosis was deeply puzzling to the experienced doctor. Blood clots had formed in Gilkey’s left calf. In the best of circumstances, he might lose his leg. But the far greater danger was that as Art moved around, the clots could break off, migrate to the lungs, and cause a fatal embolism, or blockage of a blood vessel. After wrapping Gilkey’s leg in Ace bandages and trying to “reassure” him, Houston went from tent to tent to deliver the bad news. “I can’t tell you what caused it,” he told his teammates. “It’s a disease which usually hits older people, or surgical patients. I have never heard of it in healthy young mountaineers.”

  Worse luck could hardly have struck the team. Thrombophlebitis is so rare among climbers, I’ve never seen a case of it on any of my thirty expeditions to 8,000ers. But since Gilkey, we all know that the threat exists. Long periods of inactivity when you’re stormbound in a tent can cause the blood in your legs to clot. And at altitude, the inevitable dehydration thickens your blood. It’s common practice nowadays on 8,000ers to take an aspirin a day to keep your blood thin and, when you’re stuck in a tent during a long storm, to periodically get your legs moving to improve circulation. Houston’s teammates wanted to believe that Gilkey might simply be out of action for a few days. Bob Bates asked his best friend, “How soon will he get better, Charlie?” Unwilling to burden them with his darkest thoughts, Houston gave them a guesstimate of ten days. Then he crawled back into Gilkey’s tent. He later wrote, “I did the best I could to explain his condition, leaving out the complications, taking as optimistic a note as I could, trying to hide my awful certainty that he would never reach Base Camp alive.”

  Within the team, Schoening, Molenaar, and Craig had the most experience in mountain rescue, so Houston conferred with them about the chances of getting Gilkey down the mountain. The men answered that they thought they could manage such an extreme task, but, as Houston wrote, “Their statements lacked conviction.” And:

  I did not believe them. I knew, we all knew, that no one could be carried, lowered, or dragged down the Black Pyramid, over the dreadful loose rock to Camp V, down House’s Chimney…. My mind’s eye flew over the whole route. There was no hope, absolutely none. Art was crippled. He would not recover enough to walk down. We could not carry him down.

  In his diary, Dee wrote a laconic assessment: “Situation looks desperate.” As if to mock the team’s ambitions, that very afternoon the sky in the west started clearing.

  Hopeless the rescue might be, but, in Houston’s words, “We could try, and we must.” Gilkey was placed in a sleeping bag, which was wrapped in a tent, and a climbing rope was tied to his waist. The first effort, however, was a complete failure. The days of storm had loaded the slopes below camp until they were on the verge of avalanching. The lowering was inviting disaster. The men hauled Gilkey only a few hundreds yards before they gave up.

  There was nothing to do but return to camp. That took an all-out effort. The snow was too soft and deep for the men to haul Gilkey uphill, so he had to aid the effort by making what Houston called “great leaps with his good leg.”

  The next day no one could move, as high winds tore at the tents, despite the slowly clearing sky. Gilkey’s condition seemed to improve slightly. “I’ll be climbing again tomorrow,” he told Houston, who knew that this brave promise could never be fulfilled.

  By this point, the strongest climbers were Pete Schoening and Bob Craig. On that day, August 8, Craig made a bold proposal. “Charlie,” he said, “what about a dash for the summit from here?”

  “Or maybe we could move two men up to IX today,” Schoening added. “I’m game. We might as well do something while we wait for Art’s leg to get better.”

  If Houston was miffed by his teammates’ hunger for the summit, he never said so in print. And he gave them his blessing to head upward onto the Shoulder. In the deep snow, Schoening and Craig managed only some 400 vertical feet before turning back. Dee estimated their high point at 25,800 feet. Thanks to Gilkey’s collapse, the 1953 team failed by some 200 vertical feet to match the altitude reached by Houston and Petzoldt in 1938—and by 1,700 feet the high point Wiessner and Pasang Lama had attained in 1939.

  On August 9, the storm returned in full force. And that morning, to his dismay, having listened to Gilkey’s “dry, hacking cough” through the night, Houston examined his patient and determined that the blood clots had indeed migrated to his lungs. Gilkey had a pulmonary embolism. Houston later wrote in K2: The Savage Mountain,

  This was our lowest time. For the first time I thought we might all perish here in this pitiless storm. We would never leave Art; none of us had even thought of it. But we could not move him in the storm; indeed, we could not move ourselves in the storm of that day.

  Dee’s diary entry for August 9 is equally poignant and honest:

  Charlie came by and asked how our morale was—then informed us that Art probably wouldn’t last long. My feelings are hard to put down now. A few moments later, tears are in all our eyes. (I thought I just heard Art laugh in his tent.)

  Plans change: Terrible thought that perhaps our getting down safely depends on Art’s early passing. (God, spare me from such thoughts!)

  Gilkey’s courage through this ordeal was extraordinary. He told Houston that while he felt no pain, the nonstop coughing was a “nuisance.” Houston recalled, “Art said nothing of himself. He had never talked about his death, though he was too wise not to see its imminence. He apologized for being a burden upon us. He encouraged us, spoke of another summit attempt—after we got him down.”

  The storm raged on on August 10, but Houston demanded that the men begin the rescue effort that day. “What? Move in this storm?” someone said.

  “We’ve got to,” Houston answered. “He’ll soon be dead if we don’t get him down.”

  On August 7, after the abortive first attempt to evacuate Gilkey, Schoening, and Craig had gone back out to scout for an alternative route down, one that might avoid the avalanche-prone slopes of the team’s ascent route. They returned with the news that a steep rock rib just to the west might serve that purpose. It would take the team across much more difficult ground, but it looked to be safe from avalanches.

  On August 10, the men packed up for what Bates would later describe as “the most dangerous day’s work of [each man’s] lifetime.” Gilkey was wrapped in a sleeping bag, with his feet in a rucksack. This makeshift litter was cradled by a network of ropes. Four men, each tending a separate rope—one man above, one below, one on either side—would try to pull and steer the immobile victim down the dangerous ground.

  At regular intervals, his teammates knelt close to Gilkey’s face to ask him how it was going. “I’m fine,” he answered each time, managing a wan smile. “Just fine.”

  Schoening and Molenaar went ahead to scout the route—a perilous business, in the blinding storm. For able-bodied men to descend in such conditions would have been bad enough. With the burden of their helpless invalid, the team faced an almost impossible struggle. Bates remembered that day in K2: The Savage Mountain:

  The wind and cold seeped insidiously through our la
yers of warm clothing so that by the end of the third hour none of us had feeling in his toes any longer, and grotesque icicles hung from our eyebrows, beards, and mustaches. Goggles froze over and we continually raised them on our foreheads in order to see how to handle the rope. Moving the sick man was frightfully slow.

  After hours of grim effort, however, the men had lowered Gilkey to the edge of the rock rib, at about 24,500 feet. Meanwhile, Schoening and Molenaar had located the shallow platform in the steep slope that had served as a dubious Camp VII. Only an easterly traverse of a mere 450 feet separated Gilkey from that campsite. But to haul him horizontally across the icy slope loomed as the toughest maneuver yet.

  Shortly before, Craig had been engulfed in a small windslab avalanche and had just managed to keep his purchase. Now he was so exhausted that he could barely tighten his crampon straps, so Molenaar belayed him over to the campsite. There Craig rested for a while before starting to enlarge the tent platforms with his ice ax. Molenaar returned to Gilkey and tied in with a short hank of rope to the invalid’s waist loop, hoping to help out in the delicate job of hauling the litter sideways across the slope.

  The men were strung out across the dangerously steep terrain in atrocious conditions. Coming last, Schoening had plunged his ax in to the hilt behind a small boulder, using it as an anchor as he looped the rope around the upper shaft and slowly fed it out to lower Gilkey. Bell and Streather were roped together on one rope, Houston and Bates on another. Molenaar stood beside Gilkey’s litter, tied in to it close.

  As I’ve often commented, when climbers go to the rescue of someone else, that’s when they’re most likely to get in trouble themselves. They take risks they wouldn’t normally allow themselves, and urgency and adrenaline drive them to desperate efforts. On K2 in 1992, Scott and I got caught in the avalanche that nearly cost us our lives only because we thought we had to do everything we could to help Thor Kieser and the played-out Chantal Mauduit get down. We’d have never been in that place in those conditions if we had been simply climbing from Camp III to Camp IV. And the slope where we got avalanched was very close to where Gilkey dangled on the afternoon of August 10.