by Ed Viesturs
It sounds absurd, but you wouldn’t believe how hard the Russians fight for those slots. In the USSR, the top climbers got the title of “Master of Sport,” as well as such additional perks as a free apartment and a car.
From February 16 to 26, 1954, the CAI ran its second tryout camp on Monte Rosa, after Mont Blanc the second-highest peak in the Alps. The team was then whittled down to the eleven men who supposedly performed the best, but before they could count on going to K2, each man had to pass ear, nose, throat, and dental exams as well as receive a “prescribed course of vaccination.”
Only one of those eleven would go on to be a truly world-class mountaineer. That man was the youngest of the eleven, twenty-four-year-old Walter Bonatti, who earned his living as a hutkeeper near his hometown of Monza. Despite his youth, Bonatti already had a better record than any of his teammates on cutting-edge routes in the Alps. On K2, he would end up as the pivotal figure in the dark controversy that would forever tarnish the Italian triumph—a controversy that would still burn half a century later.
One shocking result emerged from the tryout camps. Ricardo Cassin, the greatest climber in Italy in 1954, was rejected. The official explanation was that he had failed a medical test, but climbers all over Italy knew better. Fifty-two years after the expedition, and five years after Desio’s death at the astonishing age of 104, one of the principal K2 climbers, Lino Lacedelli, set the record straight:
Desio’s version was that Cassin was unable to take part for health reasons. Varicose veins were mentioned, amongst other things. But that wasn’t the real reason. If Cassin had come, all the newspapers would have focused on him rather than Desio. To me that was obvious. Cassin never got over it. He’s still upset today. For us climbers, having Cassin along would have been really great.
In his own way, Cassin took his revenge for being snubbed. In 1958, he played a crucial role in the first ascent of Gasherbrum IV in the Karakoram, as Walter Bonatti and Carlo Mauri reached the summit, setting a new standard of difficulty in the Karakoram and the Himalaya. And in 1961, at the age of fifty-two, he led the first Italian team to climb in Alaska since the Duke of the Abruzzi in 1897, as they tackled the un-climbed south face of Mount McKinley. Despite incurring serious frostbite, all six members reached the summit. The beautifully direct route, known today simply as “the Cassin,” is the most storied line on North America’s highest peak. In January 2009, Cassin himself turned one hundred years old.
Rereading Ascent of K2 today, I was struck by how completely unaware Desio was of the semicomic consequences of the gargantuan logistical effort required to keep his marching army in motion. From Skardu to Askole, for instance, the 500 porters so far employed by the Italians consumed 1,100 pounds of flour per day. There wasn’t anything like that reserve of grain in the region, so other porters had to hurry ahead to lay in depots of flour at Askole.
I’ve seen this happen on even smaller expeditions. You end up needing porters to carry the food for the other porters, who are in turn carrying food and gear for the Europeans. This makes for a huge logistical headache, but it’s unavoidable on long approach hikes. If, as is often said, an army marches on its stomach, these massive caravans are in constant danger of grinding to a halt.
At Urdukas, appalled by the wintry conditions of early May, the porters at first refused to go on. This delay meant that the team immediately needed another thousand pounds of flour, so Desio sent porters back to Askole to haul up the reserves that had been stocked in previous weeks. The caravan finally got going again, but it was no surprise that the porters called an all-out strike at Concordia. Unless the team could get its sixteen tons of stuff up the last ten miles to base camp, the expedition was doomed. Desio sounds dumbfounded by this “desertion” on the part of the porters: “Thereupon they dumped their loads and, uttering hostile shouts and singing religious songs, returned that same evening the way they had come. I was perplexed and disconcerted.”
It took the intervention of the liaison officer (the same Pakistani who had served admirably on Houston’s expedition) to sort out the mess and, in effect, bribe enough porters to carry the loads the rest of the way to base camp. It was only because the team had left Italy so early in the season that, despite all the delays en route from Skardu, they were well established at base camp by May 29.
As the 1953 American team had done, the Italians hired Hunzas from Gilgit to serve as high-altitude porters. Those thirteen men would play a far more essential role on the Abruzzi Ridge than did the Hunzas in ‘53, who never went above Camp III. Two of the Hunzas would go as high as the Italian Camp VIII, at 25,300 feet, and one of them, Amir Mahdi, would perform a heroic deed that would lead directly to the team’s eventual success and to the bitter controversy that spun out of it. Yet Desio’s narrative credits the Hunzas’ work only in the most cursory way.
One measure of how tedious Ascent of K2 is as an account of the expedition is that the reader doesn’t get to Skardu until page 94, to base camp until page 122—more than halfway through the 239-page book. And rather than seem the slightest bit embarrassed by his party’s logistical overkill, Desio revels in it. That’s a very 1950s attitude: the more gear and food, the more porters, the author implies, the more serious the expedition. It would take another couple of decades before a lightweight approach to the world’s highest mountains would start to seem purer and bolder than a massive army-style assault.
Desio also revels in his role as generalissimo. Before leaving Skardu, the leader took a flight around K2 in a plane flown by Pakistani pilots. There was absolutely no need for that flight for reconnaissance, since the climbers knew they were going to tackle the Abruzzi Ridge, about which they had learned everyting they needed to know from the Americans in Rawalpindi. But Desio devotes eight humdrum pages of his book to this joyride. It all falls vaguely under the heading of “Science” with a capital “S.” As Desio sums up this aerial diversion,
Unfortunately, the responsibility of guiding the pilots, coupled with the extremely high speed of the aircraft, prevented me from collecting all the information I would have liked regarding the orographical structure of the region and above all the relative positions of the various glacial basins. But a patient and scientific examination of our films and photographic surveys may well lead to the discovery of many hitherto unsuspected geographical features.
When I first read that paragraph, I had to look up “orographical.” It means “having to do with the branch of physical geography dealing with mountains.” I rest my case.
As early as May 26, four climbers started up the Abruzzi, hoping to discover the site of the Americans’ Camp II. (The launch of the climb that was the expedition’s central focus does not appear until page 138 of the book.) Before they could get started, though, the mountaineers were required to digest a route guide their leader had prepared.
That guide, reprinted in full in Ascent, represents a classic case of micromanaging from the rear. The leader at base camp, with his binoculars or telescope, thinks he can direct the climbers on the route better than they can themselves. A sample:
Camp VI to Camp VII. A rise of 1,640 feet. After negotiating a series of steep, difficult rocks, necessitating the use of several pitons, the climber is confronted with a dangerous eastward traverse of some 590 feet over ice which slopes at an angle of 45°.
Whether or not Desio got the idea from Pete Schoening’s A-frame tripod, which the Americans had used to haul loads up House’s Chimney, the Italians brought along a thousand-foot-long steel cable and constructed a pair of windlasses, crank-operated hauling devices. This apparatus would serve to lug vast quantities of gear over stretches as long as a thousand feet, all the way up to Camp V, at 22,000 feet. On June 2, Desio found a small saddle on the Godwin Austen Glacier; from there he supervised the first attempt to use a windlass to get loads to Camp II. “All went well,” he reported.
Slowly the climbers and the Hunzas got camps established and huge piles of gear ferried and winched up the route
. And as the distance between them and base camp grew, the climbers allowed themselves various small acts of resistance to the iron mandates of their dictator down below.
This was not easy. Every day, Desio typed out—on an actual typewriter hauled all the way to base camp—the orders for the day, then had them carried by the Hunzas or radioed up to the climbers. In 2003, when he was interviewed by an American journalist, Lino Lacedelli recalled one such command: “Order 13: ‘Who will not obey my orders will be punished with the heaviest weapon in the world—the press.’
“We called him ‘Il Capetto’ [the Little Chief],” Lacedelli reminisced. (Desio was shorter than all the climbers, some of whom stood no more than five foot five.)
In one critical respect, the 1954 Italian plan for K2 differed from those of all previous expeditions to the mountain: up high, the climbers intended to use bottled oxygen. Those bottles themselves would become a major cause of the enduring controversy.
Desio was such a control freak that long before the climbers got high on the mountain, he had decided on the precise movements to be carried out on the summit assault. The memorandum of instructions for that assault is also reprinted verbatim in Ascent of K2. A sample:
Second day. B, C, and possibly also A, the group-leader, will move up to Camp IX together with F and G. A, B and C will each carry an oxygen-mask complete with cylinders and sufficient food for two days. F and G will carry oxygen-masks in addition to a Super K2 tent and two small cylinders filled with propane. B, C and possibly A will spend the night at Camp IX, while F and G will return to Camp VIII.
You cannot, of course, dictate these kinds of troop movements on an 8,000er. Everything depends on the weather, the snow conditions, and the relative strengths of different climbers, so up high you always have to be flexible and ready to improvise to meet the challenges thrown at you. Desio just didn’t seem to get this fundamental truth about mountaineering.
The oldest among the eleven climbers, at age forty, was Achille Compagnoni. A guide and ski instructor, he had a decent record as an alpinist but was not the equal of several of his teammates, including Lacedelli and Bonatti. Nevertheless, early on Desio appointed Compagnoni as his climbing leader. This choice didn’t sit well with some of those teammates. Lacedelli wrote in 2006, in K2: The Price of Conquest:
More than anything Desio preferred those who agreed with him. Most of us were not happy with this. We were not the sort of characters to flatter the expedition leader. We did what we had to and that was all….
[Compagnoni] flattered Desio and vice versa. This annoyed us a lot, particularly later on when Desio made him leader of the first climbing group [for the summit assault]. None of us felt he deserved this.
The mutual ass-kissing between Compagnoni and Desio leaves its traces in the pages of Ascent. Desio lavishes almost no praise on the other climbers in the team, but Compagnoni is “a man endowed with great strength of both body and mind,” of whom on more than one occasion the leader stands in admiration: “I had a long conversation that day with Compagnoni, and at the end of it I was left with the unshakable conviction that he was a man of iron will who would let nothing deflect him from his main purpose.”
Then, on June 21, with the team no higher than Camp IV at 21,500 feet, a sad event took place that could well have wrecked the expedition. Three days before, Mario Puchoz, a thirty-six-year-old guide from Courmayeur, had carried a load to Camp IV, but on returning to II complained of a throat infection. As his condition worsened, the expedition doctor put him on antibiotics and bottled oxygen. At 1:00 A.M. on June 21, in Desio’s telling, “the sick man—who had appeared to be sleeping—suddenly passed away after a very brief agony.”
The doctor had diagnosed Puchoz’s condition as pneumonia, but I wonder if it wasn’t yet another case of pulmonary edema. In a difficult maneuver, several climbers managed to lower Puchoz’s body all the way to the foot of the Abruzzi Ridge. He was then buried by his teammates “in a grave carved out of rock” near the cairn erected the year before in honor of Art Gilkey. Ever since, that cenotaph has been known as the Gilkey-Puchoz memorial.
There seems to have been no thought among the team members of canceling the expedition. But, as Lacedelli later wrote,
When we returned to the camp after burying Puchoz, Desio immediately said, “Tomorrow you need to go back up!” That started a big argument because we wanted to be left alone for at least a day, after all we had lost one of our colleagues. But Desio was immovable. He wanted us to leave the next day. We went away very upset.
When a climber dies in the early stages of an expedition, the whole team has to decide whether to call it off and go home or to continue with the effort. In the latter case, the teammates always justify the decision with a phrase like the one Lacedelli used: “We must get to the summit for Mario.”
Desio’s rationale for forging onward was more grandiose: “It was our duty, then, to continue the ascent with renewed energy, that we might the sooner be able to inscribe on Puchoz’s grave-stone the date of the feat with which his name would be forever associated.”
I’m really fortunate in that I’ve never had to face that kind of decision. In fact, I’ve never lost a partner on a climb. In that situation, I don’t know what I’d do. It’s a complicated dilemma. If there’s a single determining factor in making that choice, it seems to be the size of the expedition. The larger it is, the more likely the members are to decide to go on with their campaign and climb the mountain in honor of their fallen comrade.
In 1963, the American Everest expedition lost Jake Breitenbach, one of their youngest and most skilled members, early on, when a serac collapsed in the Khumbu Icefall, crushing him beneath tons of ice. One of the two teammates who was roped to Breitenbach and witnessed the collapse described the debris as “the size of two box cars, one atop the other.” It was obvious at once that there was no hope of even searching for the man’s body. Breitenbach had had one close buddy on the team, Barry Corbet, but he’d scarcely known most of the other climbers. That impersonality within a large expedition seems to allow the members to go through a mourning ritual, but then gird up their loins and head back into battle.
On the other hand, on Chris Bonington’s eight-man attempt on K2’s west ridge in 1978, Nick Estcourt was killed in an avalanche after the men had spent only twelve days on the mountain. Those guys were among the toughest and most ambitious mountaineers of their day, but they were all good friends of Estcourt’s and had shared previous expeditions with him. After a futile search for his body, the survivors sat down to discuss what to do. They were divided right down the middle, but since only three climbers (including Bonington) wanted to go on, they all gave in to the wishes of the other four and called the expedition off.
Yet in 1952, on the French expedition to Fitz Roy in Patagonia, with a team as small and close-knit as Bonington’s, Jacques Poincenot was drowned on the approach march in a botched attempt to ford a dangerous river. Lionel Terray, one of the greatest expedition mountaineers in history, later wrote in his autobiography, Conquistadors of the Useless,
[Jacques] was a perfect companion and a prodigious climber, and his sudden disappearance dealt us a cruel blow. For forty-eight hours, indeed, we debated seriously whether to pack up and go home. After a few days we recovered our spirits and carried on, seriously weakened, however, by the loss of one of our best members.
More than a month later, Terray and Guido Magnone made the first ascent of that beautiful pyramid of granite and ice. The team named a handsome nearby peak Aiguille Poincenot, in homage to their lost comrade.
As the Italians worked their way up the Abruzzi Ridge, they found a vast range of enthusiasm and usefulness among their Hunza high-altitude porters. Only five of the thirteen seemed fully up to the challenge of carrying loads above Camp III. Of the others, Lacedelli recalled, “With them you agreed one thing and then you didn’t see them again. You would go back down and discover that they were still in the tent sleeping. It would drive
you mad.”
Desio, too, complained about these slackers: “The language difficulty, the indiscipline of the Hunzas and the capriciousness of certain among them … frequently led to misunderstandings which it was not always easy to clear up.” Disciplinarian to the end, Desio eventually ordered “the dismissal of three men and the return of the five delinquents to their posts on the Abruzzi Ridge.”
Fifty-five years later, it’s hard to guess what was going on with the Hunzas. The language barrier must indeed have played its nefarious part. Since the Karakoram region had for so long been part of British India, some of the Hunzas spoke a smattering of English. But they certainly didn’t speak any Italian. Desio could probably get by in English, but mountain guides such as Compagnoni, Lacedelli, and Bonatti, who had never traveled far from northern Italy, didn’t comprehend a word of that language.
It may be fortunate that the less courageous Hunzas were scared out of their minds on the Abruzzi Ridge. Houston’s team had wisely decided that the Hunzas’ meager climbing skills made them a liability above Camp III. Desio, however, expected them to carry loads all the way up to the Shoulder at 26,000 feet. Hunza terror on steep terrain may well have looked to the Italians like mere laziness. It’s also possible that these high-altitude porters bridled every bit as much as Lacedelli and his disaffected teammates did under Desio’s stern dictatorship.
One incident barely mentioned in Desio’s text reveals the true courage some of the Hunzas were capable of. On July 6, one of the climbers, Cirillo Floreanini, started to descend from Camp III. For security, he held on to a fixed rope left from the American expedition the year before, but he had no sooner put his weight on the rope than the anchor popped loose. Before the horrified eyes of his teammates, Floreanini rolled and then bounced 800 feet before stopping on a narrow ledge. Lacedelli ran to his aid. Writes Desio, “Bruised and bleeding, he was then hoisted on to the shoulders of a Hunza, who, helped by his colleagues, carried him down to Camp II.”