K2

by Ed Viesturs

  Like so many other Poles in the high mountains, Kukuczka had stuck his neck way, way out there—and gotten away with it. And sadly, like so many great climbers who take risk to the ultimate, he would cut his margin too thin only three years later, on the south face of Lhotse.

  The joy Kukuczka had felt on the summit (“We were both ecstatic,” he recalled) was canceled by the loss of his partner. “My experiences on that mountain were too tragic,” he later noted, ending his account, “and the price we paid for victory was too high.”

  At base camp Kukuczka embraced Wanda Rutkiewicz. Stunned by the death of Piotrowski, one of her dearest friends, she at last abandoned her own plan—despite her frostbitten fingers—to try Broad Peak that summer.

  Meanwhile, Renato Casarotto was attempting the Magic Line solo. His wife, Goretta, who had climbed Gasherbrum II with him the year before, served on K2 in effect as his base camp manager. The two were in radio contact several times each day.

  Casarotto was motivated by a personal vendetta as well as by the aesthetic appeal of the Magic Line. He had been a member of Reinhold Messner’s 1979 K2 expedition, on which he had not performed well. What should have been a private disappointment became a public humiliation when Messner disparaged Casarotto in his book about K2: “I invited Renato Casarotto because I believed him at the time to be one of the ablest European climbers…. [But] I felt let down … by Renato as a climber.” And according to Jim Curran, at a meeting of high-altitude climbers in the Tyrol in 1985, when someone told him about Casarotto’s ambitions for the next summer, Messner spat, “He’ll never make it!”

  In 1986, Casarotto went after his monumental goal with admirable cautiousness. On two attempts, he reached 26,900 feet before turning back because of weather and dangerous conditions. In mid-July, he made his third attempt. This time he got above 27,000 feet, but ferocious winds once again defeated him. Kurt Diemberger, who was close friends with the Casarottos, overheard a radio conversation from that third attempt, which he quoted in The Endless Knot:

  GORETTA: How are you feeling, Renato?

  RENATO: I’m OK … fine, really. So far. But I’m tired now. and so fed up with this whole business that I’d like to pack it in, come down, get away from here.

  On July 16, Casarotto headed down once more. He had been on K2 for two months and had come within only about 1,000 feet of the summit, but he had promised Goretta that the third attempt would be his last. Once he got back to base camp, the pair would pack up and head for home.

  Slowly and carefully, Casarotto descended the dangerous route. At last he reached the foot of the face and started to trudge across the glacier toward base camp.

  Standing beside his own tent, Diemberger saw “a small dot … actually more of a comma” approaching from a little more than a mile away. He continued to watch: “Now the comma was moving forward almost horizontally across the plateau—there! Then, suddenly, it vanished. Wiped out. I rubbed my eyes in amazement and peered again. Nothing. Nothing at all. Yet I hadn’t dreamt it, had I?”

  With his decades of mountaineering experience, Diemberger feared the worst—that Casarotto had fallen into a crevasse. Hesitantly, he approached Goretta, who had been waiting for the scheduled evening radio call from her husband. “Ciao, Kurt, what’s the matter?” she greeted him.

  “Renato—where is he now?” Diemberger asked.

  “Still on the ridge.”

  For a moment, I felt relief. Then fear clutched at my heart again: somebody was on the glacier … if not Renato, then who? …

  “It’s just that I saw someone, something, further down.” I didn’t want to say more than that.

  Diemberger persuaded Goretta to try the radio. “The next moments will stay with me forever,” Diemberger later wrote.

  “Goretta, I have fallen …,” said the weak voice. “I am dying … please send help quickly.”

  Diemberger and several Italians grabbed ropes and gear and dashed toward the invisible crevasse. Along the way, one of the Italians managed to keep up radio contact with Casarotto. Then the rescuers saw the telltale hole in the glacier. The crevasse was only a couple of feet wide, and the snow bridge that had broken beneath the soloist lay right on a wellbeaten path that many others had blithely hiked during the previous weeks.

  An Italian rappelled into the crevasse. Narrow it might have been at the top, but it swelled beneath the surface into a monstrous cavern. One hundred and thirty feet down, the Italian found Casarotto “leaning against his rucksack in total darkness, with water running everywhere.” The two men embraced, and the rescuer put a waist harness on his stricken comrade.

  Even with several men hauling on different ropes, it is a very difficult task to pull an inert victim out of a crevasse. Because the ropes tend to cut into the snow on the lips of the fissure, they must be run over ice axes laid flat near the edge. It took several attempts before the men could hoist Casarotto almost to the surface. By then, he was unconscious.

  Once they got him onto the level glacier, the rescuers wrapped Casarotto in sleeping bags. An Italian shined a headlamp on the victim’s face. His eyes flickered briefly. He was still alive.

  But moments later, he was dead. Internal injuries from the fall had doomed him from the moment he’d landed on the snow ledge in the darkness, 130 feet down.

  Word of her husband’s death was carried down to Goretta. She started up the glacier to say good-bye to Renato, but changed her mind halfway there and returned to base camp. Before leaving the scene of the accident, the men who had tried to rescue Casarotto dropped his body back into the crevasse. To nonclimbers, that may seem like a brutal act, but it’s the most common grave for mountaineers in the great ranges. On an 8,000er, it’s almost logistically impossible to carry a dead climber back to base camp, somehow summon a helicopter to lift the body back to the nearest village, and then arrange to ship it home. (It’s been done in a few rare cases, among them that of Chantal Mauduit, my friend from K2, after she died on Dhaulagiri in 1998.)

  There are worse places to be buried than in a crevasse at the foot of a great mountain. If I had died on some 8,000er, I wouldn’t have minded too much if my friends had consigned me to the nearest crevasse. It would have been much easier for everyone involved to leave me on the mountain. It wouldn’t have made sense for them to go to all the trouble and expense (not to mention paperwork!) of bringing me home just so I could be buried on U.S. soil.

  The British team had gathered at base camp upon learning of Casarotto’s demise. Jim Curran wrote, “I mumbled my condolences to Goretta, lost for words.” With dignified control, she answered in English, “Please thank your friends for trying to help to save my husband.”

  Is there anything to be learned from Casarotto’s death? Perhaps, after the ordeal of safely descending thousands of feet on the Magic Line, once he reached the glacier, he let down his guard. One of my favorite mountaineering mottos is “Crevasses don’t care if you’re a pro or not.” The crevasse into which Casarotto fell was so narrow on the surface that he could easily have jumped across it. But snow bridges are fiendishly deceptive: they often look exactly like any other harmless patch of glacial surface. If you’re going to try to solo an 8,000er, you almost have to cross crevasses on snow bridges that could collapse under your weight. A number of great mountaineers have died falling into crevasses—including Louis Lachenal, the conqueror of Annapurna, who perished in 1955 on a routine ski descent of the Vallée Blanche above his home town of Chamonix. And ever since my close partner J.-C. Lafaille disappeared high on Makalu on a solo winter attempt in 2006, I’ve thought that his death was most likely caused by his falling into a crevasse. Even a lifetime of climbing experience is no safeguard against a hidden crack in a glacier.

  I’ve always been supercautious about crevasses, roping up where other climbers blithely travel solo, as I did on every trip through the funky icefall just below the foot of the Abruzzi Ridge. On my only solo expedition, to the north side of Everest in 1993, I dealt with the
crevasses by wearing snowshoes or skis whenever I could, thereby spreading my body weight over a larger surface. I also made sure to climb the glacier only in the predawn cold, when its surface was as hard as it gets. Even so, traveling alone on the glacier was probably the scariest part of the climb, since I had so little control over what might happen.

  Some of my climbing friends are astonished to learn that despite all the expeditions I’ve been on, I’ve never fallen into a crevasse. I’ve plunged into holes up to my waist several times, but always caught myself with my arms and managed to extricate myself without breaking loose more of the snow bridge and taking a nasty plunge. (And believe me, the insides of crevasses are nasty places!) The absence of crevasse falls on my mountaineering résumé is partly just sheer luck, but I like to think it’s mainly the result of my healthy respect for those hidden death traps.

  The latest tragedy sent shock waves reverberating all over the mountain. As Jim Curran would write:

  For many of us the death of Renato Casarotto was the last Straw…. The circumstances were so harrowing that I felt it was surprising that anyone had the willpower to stay on, yet even after six deaths some of us felt that there couldn’t possibly be any more and that going home wouldn’t change anything. And so, as July dragged on and the warm, wet monsoon-like weather kept everyone at Base Camp, the remnants of nine expeditions re-formed and regrouped for one last big effort.

  On August 3 and 4, however, two more deaths occurred. One was the result of an almost absurd fluke: Mohammed Ali, the sirdar of the Pakistani high-altitude porters for a Korean team trying the Abruzzi Ridge, was making a routine shuttle between advance base camp and Camp I, on the lowest slopes of the spur, when a falling stone struck him in the head, killing him instantly.

  The other accident occurred at the end of yet another epic ascent. After the deaths of Smolich and Pennington on the Magic Line, and of Casarotto on the glacier just below it, another team, made up mostly of Poles, went to work on that route, which was already being called K2’s “last great problem.” At the end of an epic struggle, three members completed the route, arriving nearly exhausted on the summit at 6:00 P.M. on August 3. The trio decided to descend the Abruzzi Ridge rather than the Magic Line. Just before midnight, the men were rappelling fixed ropes that had been recently strung up the Bottleneck couloir by the Korean team. Coming last was Wojciech Wróż, an experienced Himalayan veteran making his third attempt on K2.

  In the dark, his teammates noticed a “one-meter gap” between the bottom of one fixed rope and the top anchor of the rope below it. They warned each other about the gap, and the first two men reached the bottom end of the last rope without mishap. Only a relatively easy snow slope lay between them and Camp IV, on the Shoulder.

  The two men waited for Wróż to join them. The expedition leader later reported, “Suddenly they heard the noise of a fall. They feared the worst, but, exhausted, could do nothing more than to wait.” Wróż never appeared. His partners could not be sure what had happened, but they guessed that Wróż must have rappelled off the end of the rope above the one-meter gap. There was nothing the two men could do but head on down themselves.

  At base camp, a bitter argument broke out between the Polish and the Korean team leaders about the placing of the ropes and the one-meter gap. Curran’s view was more philosophical: “The Poles should not have been relying on the Koreans’ fixed ropes in the first place. But when the ropes were there and others were using them, it would be ridiculous to expect them to ignore them, either on purist or practical grounds.”

  I think all this blame casting misses a more basic point. What happened to Wróż is what happens to climbers when they’re pushed to the very limit. If you have to call on your last reserves just to get down a mountain, it’s the easiest thing in the world to make a simple mistake, like rappelling off the end of a rope in the dark. In forging the first ascents of the south face and the Magic Line, the Poles proved they were the toughest climbers on the mountain in 1986. But both Wróż and Piotrowski paid for their brilliant conquests with their lives.

  Like Kukuczka and Piotrowski, the trio on the Magic Line had climbed a route so difficult, and had so deeply drawn on their reserves of strength, that their only hope for survival was to come down an easier route that had been fixed by others. Some observers see that as cutting-edge alpinism, but for me, it’s leaving too much up to luck. Sometimes you get away with it; sometimes you don’t.

  Another eternal verity about the 8,000ers cannot be emphasized too much. In general, more climbers die on the descent of a great mountain than on the ascent. The Poles solved all the extreme technical problems as they fought their way up their breakthrough routes. It was only on the way down the relatively easy Abruzzi Ridge, with almost no gas left in their tanks, that they came to grief. Thus by the second week in August, eight climbers had lost their lives on K2 in a single summer, by far the deadliest toll in the mountain’s history. And yet the worst was still to come.

  The British team on the northwest ridge was coming apart at the seams. Besides the leader, Alan Rouse, the team was made up of some of the crème de la crème of British mountaineering: John Barry, John Porter, Brian Hall, and the infamous Burgess twins, Alan and Adrian—hippie iconoclasts who were nonetheless top-notch, quite conservative mountaineers.

  As they attacked an unclimbed route on K2, with the prospect of becoming the first Brits to climb the mountain, the team was buoyed by promises of book and film contracts. In the middle of the expedition, the climbers got a letter from the wife of one of their Himalayan cronies back home, informing them that the word was out that the climbers would be knighted by the queen if they got to the top. This was apparently a spoof, but such an honor would not have been inconceivable. After all, John Hunt and Edmund Hillary had been knighted after the first ascent of Everest.

  But the team never jelled on the mountain. Rouse divided his climbers into two foursomes, infelicitously calling them the “A Team” and the “B Team.” (He put the Burgess brothers on separate teams, even though they were used to climbing together.) And no one seemed happy with Rouse’s leadership, which was constantly vacillating and indecisive. In K2: Triumph and Tragedy, Jim Curran painted a basically sympathetic portrait of Rouse, to whom he was loyal to the end. But John Barry wrote his own book, called K2: Savage Mountain, Savage Summer, culled mainly from his own diary entries, which are scathing about Rouse:

  As a leader, his is an inept performance. He admits that he wants the commercial benefits of being a leader but is unwilling to take the responsibilities that go with it—mainly the reduction of his chances of making the summit. Overheard him say that he’d prefer to go alpine style and abandon the expedition.

  Barry is as gleeful a tell-all narrator as Galen Rowell and Rick Ridgeway were in their K2 books. The diary entries paint a dreary picture of constant bickering: “Big row. I tell Al-R [Rouse, to distinguish him from Al Burgess] that I think he’s a fool. Al goes off to tent in tears. Jim-C[urran] follows to comfort him. But still there is no apology or commitment to Wilkie. Wilkie pulls out.”

  The biggest problem for the British expedition, however, was that despite repeated efforts, the climbers made little headway on the northwest ridge. The intricacies of the route, the misery of the snow conditions, and the danger posed by avalanche slopes and precarious seracs defeated these crack alpinists. The team reached an altitude of only 24,300 feet before giving up. The northwest ridge would finally be climbed in 1991 by a pair of dedicated French mountaineers, Pierre Béghin and Christophe Profit, but even their ascent line deviated onto the north face high on the mountain.

  As early as July 7, Rouse’s party threw in the towel on the northwest ridge. In his diary, Barry laconically recorded:

  We are quitting the NW Ridge. I’m disappointed. We have 3 weeks left at least.

  Reasons: team too small … route too long.

  Abruzzi a clear run.

  By this early date, a number of Rouse’s teammates had
suddenly remembered that they had job obligations back home. By ones and twos over the following weeks, they abandoned the expedition and started the long hike out. John Barry himself defected on July 28. As a result, his book is hugely anticlimactic, the long last chapter devoted to his humdrum hike back to civilization rather than to the drama that would soon unfold on the mountain.

  In changing routes from the northwest ridge to the Abruzzi, Rouse was breaking all the rules, for his permit covered only the former route. As Barry wrote, “There’s great secrecy surrounding our switch to the Abruzzi. Al-R doesn’t wish to be banned from Pakistan for ten years; which he says is what the punishment would be. Phil [Burke] says that it would be a reward. I’m beyond caring.”

  The Brits had sardonically nicknamed the mass base camp at the foot of the Abruzzi “the Strip.” Now, to get on the route themselves, the climbers still committed to the mountain transferred all their gear to a new base camp, as they sneaked past the Strip, hoping that the various liaison officers from other teams would not discover their transgression. The two narratives of the British expedition start to take on a comic tone at this point. The whole expedition, in fact, could have been treated as a comedy (this seems to have been John Barry’s intention from the start), had it not ended in the disaster of early August.

  By the beginning of that month, among the Brits only Al Rouse was still fully committed to an attempt on K2. Jim Curran would linger on, but strictly in the role of chronicler, scarcely climbing above Camp I. And now Rouse completed his defection from his own team, as he announced that he was pairing up with a woman from the Polish team to climb the Abruzzi. Whether Rouse and Dobroslawa Wolf (known as Mrufka, Polish for “ant”) had started having an affair is pretty much irrelevant. What matters is that all semblance of teamwork—except the dogged loyalty of Curran at base camp—had vanished from the British expedition.