K2

by Ed Viesturs

  Kurt Diemberger and Julie Tullis had spent most of their time so far on K2 filmmaking for the Italian team to which they were attached. Calling themselves Quota 8000, those climbers had started work on the Magic Line, but after the deaths of Pennington and Smolich, they had bailed and switched over to the Abruzzi. Unlike the British, the Italians claimed they had obtained permits beforehand for both routes, though climbers from other teams were skeptical.

  Diemberger and Tullis’s not-so-secret agenda was to climb K2, rather than simply make a film about their teammates. They were an odd pair, the subject of gossip all over the mountain. Tullis, at forty-seven, and Diemberger, at fifty-four, were both married—apparently happily—and Diemberger’s The Endless Knot unabashedly credits the help and goodwill of Terry Tullis and Teresa Diemberger. But when he writes about the bond between himself and Julie, passage after passage reverberates with an intimate passion. For example:

  Each step is a step into boundless possibility.

  Julie says it more simply: wherever I go, anything is possible.

  I say: where anything is possible, there I go.

  That’s why we are together.

  Or:

  If just one of us, as a conclusion of our first years together, reached the summit of K2—wouldn’t that be fulfillment for both? Even if only one trod the dream summit? Only one made the dream come true?

  Granted, Diemberger has always been a writer inclined toward the mystical and the emotional. What matters is not whether Diemberger and Tullis were lovers (with or without the knowledge of their spouses) but whether the very emotionality of their relationship, like that newly formed between Rouse and Mrufka, interfered with good judgment on this dangerous mountain.

  At first, Jim Curran took a slightly jaundiced view of the Tullis-Diemberger pairing. He had known Tullis for years, though not well, through encounters at climbing meets and festivals in Britain. She struck him as, on the one hand, “a bright, attractive, and apparently conventional housewife” and, on the other, as “a rather bossy ‘head girl.’” He was not at all sure Tullis was ready for K2, for “her actual mountaineering experience was rather limited and certainly had not got the foundation of Scottish winter and extreme alpine climbing,” which the best British alpinists considered mandatory before one tackled the most serious mountains.

  Diemberger, whom Curran had also known casually over the years, “radiated a massive self-confidence, amounting at times to self-importance.” But at K2 base camp one day, as Diemberger reminisced about Broad Peak with Hermann Buhl in 1957, Curran was won over by the legend: “I was suddenly conscious that here was a major part of Himalayan climbing history in the flesh.”

  The crux of Curran’s analysis of the bond between the British woman and the Austrian man was that Julie, “through her devotion, almost amounting to hero-worship, of Kurt, had come to see herself as a world-class mountaineer in her own right.” And that spelled trouble.

  On K2 in 1992, despite my undeniable attraction to Chantal Mauduit, and even as I wondered whether she was flirting with me, I had no intention of getting involved with her during the expedition. My own concentration and commitment, I absolutely believed, depended on having no relationship with another climber that might undercut my motivation or cloud my judgment. All of my energy and focus needed to be on trying to climb K2. Anything less could spell failure or even disaster.

  On August 2, Tullis and Diemberger, along with Rouse and Mrufka and three Koreans, all reached the Shoulder, at 26,000 feet. They had been preceded by three Austrians—Willi Bauer, Alfred Imitzer, and Hannes Wieser—who that day were attempting to go for the summit but had to turn back at 27,500 feet. This created a serious space problem at Camp IV, where only three tents stood, normally capable of housing seven climbers. When the Austrians returned late that afternoon, they pleaded to be allowed to jam in with the others, so that they could make one more try for the top. At last the Koreans generously accepted two of the Austrians, so that night five men slept piled together in a three-man tent. Rouse and Mrufka invited the third Austrian into their tent. But Diemberger refused to share his and Tullis’s tent, despite (or because of) the fact that the Austrians were his compatriots. (Afterward, there would be hard feelings between Diemberger and Bauer.)

  On August 3, the Koreans set out for the summit. They reached it late in the afternoon and were overtaken by night on the descent. Two of the Koreans regained Camp IV, while the third survived a bivouac above the Bottleneck, having tied himself off to a piton. (That same night the three Poles who had made the first ascent of the Magic Line came down the Abruzzi, only to lose Wojciech Wróż in the darkness.)

  Later, many would wonder why the “Europeans” (Brits are not, strictly speaking, Europeans)—Tullis and Diemberger, Rouse and Mrufka, and the three Austrians—didn’t go for the summit with the Koreans on August 3, while the weather was still fine. The vague explanation offered by the survivors was that they needed a day of rest and wanted to avoid a traffic jam in the Bottleneck. Another factor may have been that, of all the teams on the mountain that summer, the Koreans were felt to be climbing in the poorest style. Using old-fashioned heavy logistics, their nineteen-man team had strung the route with fixed ropes up the Bottleneck and across the leftward traverse above it. On August 3, the three summiteers used bottled oxygen all the way, the only climbers that season to rely on gas. Yet the Koreans survived where others did not.

  With the addition of the two Poles from the Magic Line, the tent situation at Camp IV on the night of August 3 became drastic. Showing remarkable magnanimity, Rouse let the Poles move in with him and Mrufka, even though that meant that he spent the night halfway out of the tent, his upper body nestled in a snow hole. The third Austrian moved into the Korean tent. Once again, Diemberger and Tullis refused to accommodate any of the refugees.

  In The Endless Knot, though he acknowledges the overcrowding problem, Diemberger never explains why he and Tullis were unwilling to share their tent—in fact, he dances so cleverly around the truth that if you had only his account of the expedition to go by, you’d never uncover that selfishness.

  It seems clear that the later debilitation of many of the climbers at Camp IV was partly a result of the miserable nights they spent in crowded tents on August 2 and 3. At 26,000 feet, it’s hard enough to sleep in “normal” quarters, let alone with too many climbers crammed into too small a tent.

  On August 4, the seven “Europeans” set out for the top. Rouse and Mrufka were the first out of camp, but they departed only at dawn, not in the middle of the night, as Charley, Scott, and I would do six years later. Despite two nearly sleepless nights, Rouse was the strongest climber among the seven, and in fact he broke trail nearly all the way. Mrufka quickly fell behind. One of the Austrians, Hannes Wieser, turned back a short way above Camp IV. Willi Bauer and Alfred Imitzer caught up with Rouse not far below the summit and took over the trail-breaking. They reached the top at 3:15 P.M., Rouse not long afterward. After two and a half months on the mountain, he had finally claimed the first British ascent of K2.

  Tullis and Diemberger had actually set out from Camp IV before the Austrians, but they’d quickly been overtaken by Bauer and Imitzer. The weather was holding perfect. Diemberger’s account of the summit climb in The Endless Knot is so rich in mystical transport that you have to read between the lines to figure out what was going on with Tullis and himself. They climbed roped together, as no one else did, and they were very slow. Sensibly, they vowed not to reach the summit later than 4:00 P.M., but by 3:00 P.M. they were still 650 vertical feet below the top.

  Suddenly they came upon Mrufka, leaning immobile against the slope. To their shock, they saw that the Polish woman was asleep. Diemberger woke her up and offered her a candy. “She reacts with alarm, looking up full of surprise,” he later wrote. “‘No … Up … I have to go up!” As Diemberger and Tullis continued on, Mrufka put on a burst of speed and tried to pass them. Tullis suggested that she follow in their tracks, for sh
e was clearly half out of her mind, but Mrufka blurted out, “I don’t want to climb behind an old man.”

  For long moments, Mrufka flailed away clumsily on the steep slope above Diemberger and Tullis, who were terrified that she would fall and knock them off their feet, or snag their rope and pull them off. Eventually Mrufka passed out of sight to the right.

  At 4:00 P.M., Bauer and Imitzer suddenly appeared, heading down. Diemberger recounted their conversation.

  “Are you sure you still want to go up?” Bauer asked him.

  “It shouldn’t take us more than an hour at most,” he replied.

  “You’re wrong. It took us four hours!”

  Diemberger could not believe what he was hearing. Finally he deduced that Bauer meant four hours from the top of the traverse out of the Bottleneck, not from their present position. (It sounds as though no one was thinking very clearly that day high on K2.) Reassured by this rationalization, Diemberger and Tullis pushed on, violating their own turnaround deadline. But first Diemberger asked Bauer, “Are there any crevasses where you can bivouac?”

  Diemberger was indisputably a world-class mountaineer, but he was also fifty-four years old. I suspect that he and Tullis wanted the summit too badly, and that the “endless knot” of their interwoven partnership, combined with hypoxia, goaded them into making the foolish decision to push on. In their situation, no matter how much I might have craved the summit, if it was after 4:00 P.M. I would have given it up and descended.

  My own turnaround time is an inflexible 2:00 P.M. I’ve never violated that deadline. And I’ve never had to stop and turn back because it got too late. It’s all about planning beforehand and starting early enough in the day. Too many times I’ve seen climbers invite trouble just by leaving for the top too late in the morning.

  Diemberger and Tullis reached the summit at 5:30 P.M. In The Endless Knot, he recalls that triumph:

  The joy! The happiness! We cling to one another. For this one moment of eternity, K2—beautiful K2—is ours.

  “Julie—the peak we most desired!” I feel my voice trembling as I look into the big, dark eyes under the hood….

  “Our very special mountain,” she whispers. It is, it is—our own and very special mountain.

  This sounds like the perfect recipe for an unfolding disaster. But the most extraordinary thing about the summit push on August 4, 1986, is that all seven climbers made it back to Camp IV in one piece. On his way down from the top, Rouse found Mrufka still inching her way painfully upward. After a heated argument, he persuaded her to turn around and descend. At Camp IV, Willi Bauer said later, “She cried in her tent because she hadn’t made it to the top…. I told her, ‘Mrufka, be happy that we’re alive.’”

  Diemberger and Tullis did not leave the summit until after 6:00 P.M. By then, the weather was deteriorating. All the way down, Tullis was near collapse. Diemberger went first on the rope to find the route. Suddenly he heard her call out his name: she had fallen and was cartwheeling down the steep slope. Diemberger plunged his ax in, put his weight on the head, and almost stopped her fall before he was wrenched from his stance by the rope. The two fell several hundred feet, out of control, before miraculously sliding to a stop.

  The only headlamp the pair carried had failed to work. In the dark, with a belay from his partner, feeling more than seeing his way, Diemberger climbed into a crevasse to scout it for a bivouac site, only to discover that he was standing on a fast-crumbling snow bridge. He screamed at Tullis to pull him out, but, much lighter than the heavyset Austrian, she could barely hold him in place. With a desperate effort, Diemberger clawed his way back to the surface with his ice ax.

  The pair finally bivouacked in a hollow snow niche they excavated out of the slope, at 27,500 feet. Since they had left their rucksack anchored to a piton at the top of the traverse out of the Bottleneck, they did not even have the space blanket Diemberger had stuck in his pack as an emergency shelter. It was a blessing that the storm held off until morning, but in the night both climbers suffered serious frostbite. At first light on August 5, in a whiteout, the two started down again, but they were effectively lost. Zigzagging back and forth, they finally struck the Korean fixed ropes and managed to get down the Bottleneck; in the mist, however, they could not locate Camp IV. Diemberger began shouting, and at last Bauer heard his cries and shouted back, guiding the two stricken climbers into camp.

  Bauer later reported that he had dragged Tullis on her back the last stretch into camp, that “her nose and cheeks [were] quite black showing definite signs of first degree frostbite,” and that her gloveless “right hand [was] swollen and bits of flesh [were] hanging down.” In The Endless Knot, Diemberger vehemently disputed these assertions, insisting that Tullis had made it into camp under her own power.

  In any case, Bauer and Imitzer took Tullis into their tent, the largest of the three at Camp IV, fed her hot drinks, and tried to warm her with a spare down jacket. Eventually she returned to the tent she and Diemberger had pitched on the Shoulder on August 2.

  Five of the seven climbers ensconced in Camp IV had reached the summit. To avert catastrophe, all they needed to do now was head down the mountain, following a route that was hung with fixed ropes most of the way. But the looming storm had finally arrived. The climbers stayed in their tents all through August 5. They would not try to descend, in fact, for another five days.

  At base camp, Jim Curran and the other watchers could only guess what was happening high on the mountain, for there was no radio in Camp IV. In the storm, it would not be possible to climb up the Abruzzi Ridge to attempt a rescue, and as day succeeded day, the thoughts of those below turned dark. On August 5 and 7, there were lulls in the storm. On the latter day, Curran could see all the way up to the Shoulder. He said to the others in base camp, “If anyone is up, they will be, I imagine, hot-footing it down.” But no one arrived that day, or the next, or the next.

  What happened at Camp IV from August 5 to 10 is still something of a mystery. Al Rouse, who had been the strongest of all seven climbers on summit day, had repeatedly vowed that one must spend as few days as possible at 26,000 feet. It seems that a kind of apathy took hold, the inevitable concomitant of the hypoxic states that perhaps all seven had entered on August 4; and that apathy most likely was reinforced by the complete exhaustion of Tullis and Diemberger.

  On the night of August 5, winds that Diemberger estimated at sixty miles an hour piled heavy drifts of snow against the walls of the tent he shared with Tullis, threatening to break the poles. The Austrian was incapable of punching his way loose from inside, and by now Tullis was snowblind as well as shivering with cold. In the morning, the two called out for help. First Rouse, then Bauer tried to dig the tent loose from outside, before giving up in the blizzard. Their furious ice ax blows tore holes in the tent fabric, however, forcing Tullis and Diemberger to abandon their shelter.

  Dashing through the storm, Tullis tumbled into the Austrian tent, while Diemberger crawled inside Rouse’s. The man who had refused to share his tent with the refugees on August 2 and 3 now had to beg, “Please, let me in!” Without hesitation, Rouse and Bauer granted the same mercy Diemberger had denied others. But now the misery of overcrowded quarters once again sapped the willpower of the seven. They spent another night without leaving their tents.

  During the night, the storm eased up, and the climbers prepared to make their getaway in the morning. At first light, however, as Diemberger later wrote, “there was no visibility…. With only the one line of escape, the risk of getting lost in thick fog or cloud on the Shoulder was great.” So the climbers stayed put.

  In my view, this is a crucial passage. It’s startling that in all the subsequent discussion of the 1986 disaster, no one brought up the question of willow wands. That was the first thing that leapt to my attention when I read The Endless Knot and K2: Triumph and Tragedy before my 1992 expedition. Had the climbers wanded the route between the top of the fixed ropes and Camp IV, they could have managed to get
down on August 7, whiteout or no. But neither Curran nor Diemberger even mentions this oversight as contributing to the tragedy.

  There’s a curious passage much earlier in Diemberger’s book, however, that illuminates the thinking of the “Europeans.” On the way up to the Shoulder on August 2, he remarks, “I notice that only one of the bamboo sticks the high-altitude porters have brought up bears a red pennant; the other marker flags have either been lost during the transport along the ridge or have not yet been fixed. No time to sort that out now.”

  The porters, of course, were Pakistanis working for the Korean expedition. Why didn’t it occur to Diemberger and Tullis, or Rouse and Mrufka, or the three Austrians to bring and plant their own willow wands? That’s porters’ work, Diemberger seems to imply. Even more curiously, on that crucial slope below the Shoulder, the Austrian comes across a cached bundle of wands but declines to pick them up. He recalls, “I look at the bundle thoughtfully: they’re no protection against avalanches, that’s for sure. To put them in now, so near to the end of our time here, seems pedantic, an over-scrupulous precaution.”

  Of course willow wands are no protection against avalanches! That’s not what they’re for. When I first read that passage, I wondered how such an experienced mountaineer as Diemberger could have been so blasé about willow wands. Now I realize, as I said earlier, that’s it’s just not chic for Europeans to climb with those garden stakes sticking out of their packs. And the same goes for Brits: unlike Americans, they have little or no tradition of wanding routes in the great ranges to safeguard a descent in a storm.