by Ed Viesturs
K2 was the greatest adventure of my climbing life. It was the ultimate test of my mountaineering skills. It had everything: close calls, interminable waits during storms, retreats to base camp, desperate rescues of other climbers. I not only needed all my ability to get up the mountain, I needed all my patience. (Sometimes I call K2 the “full meal deal” of mountaineering—everything you could ask for in a climb, and more.) In all of my expeditions to 8,000ers, I’ve never spent so long on a peak before getting to the top. K2 was a lifetime of expeditions packed into one summer.
It was also one of the two or three most important turning points in my life. As I hiked out the Baltoro that August, I could finally say to myself, I really do have the skills to get up the 8,000ers. I’ve climbed the three highest. What about the others? Ultimately, K2 gave me the push and the confidence to conceive of my Endeavor 8000.
By 2008, I’d been on ten expeditions to Mount Everest. I’d reached its summit six times. Ever since 2005, when I finished the cycle of the fourteen 8,000ers by climbing Annapurna, I’d always entertained the thought that, given the right circumstances, I might give Everest another go.
Then, just last spring, the right circumstances fell into place. On March 25, 2009, I set out once more for the world’s highest mountain, trekking up the Khumbu Valley for the seventh time on the way to base camp on the south side. Three months shy of my fiftieth birthday, I still felt as physically fit as I ever had.
The expedition was organized by the Eddie Bauer company. By now, I’m part of a team helping design a new line of technical gear, called First Ascent. Showcasing the products on Everest was to be the final stage of the company’s official launch of that line of products.
It was an honor for me to be part of the Eddie Bauer campaign. The primary draw for me in returning to Everest, however, was the challenge of trying to climb to 29,035 feet again. People often ask when I’m going to quit climbing. My response is “I’ll quit when I no longer enjoy it, or can’t do it anymore.”
Everest was as crowded as ever last spring. My biggest problem on the mountain, besides the usual spells of bad weather, was the traffic congestion up high on the South Col route. But I bided my time through late April and early May, and finally the weather forecast seemed favorable for a summit push. It’s always a bit of a gamble to leave base camp, with high camp still three days away, and to time it just right for a summit attempt. We had originally hoped to go for the top on May 17, thereby beating the crowds. But May 17 was a bust, with extremely high winds and near-zero visibility. So we waited in our tents on the South Col all day and night. And as we waited, many other climbers arrived. We knew the traffic would be heavy the next day.
Finally, at 11:00 P.M. on May 18, four teammates and I left the South Col. It was not only pretty crowded on the route, but it was quite cold—somebody said minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Even so, we made good time, reaching the Balcony at 3:00 A.M., the summit at 8:00 A.M.
By the time the sun rose, it was a nice day, slightly breezy but warm enough and gloriously clear. The descent was uneventful, and we got back to the South Col at 1:00 P.M. As I wrote on my website, “So, 14-hour round trip. My seventh ascent of the mountain and more than likely my last ascent of the mountain. It was a great place to revisit, to come back to Everest, but I don’t have the desire anymore to come back and climb the mountain for the eighth time.”
On Everest in spring 2009, I made a choice I’d never resorted to before, which was to use supplemental oxygen even though I had no client to guide. I explained the decision on my website: “Knowing that the next day would be rather cold and windy, as a safety issue I felt it would be better to stay with the team and use supplemental oxygen. So it was more based on safety, and sticking with my group. So I kind of compromised my ascent but it still worked out well.” It was gratifying later to learn that the people following our expedition online uniformly praised my decision, rather than needling me about compromising my purist style.
Climbing Everest again seemed reasonable. But there’s no way I’d ever try K2 again. Objectively, it’s not that severe a climb, at least on the Abruzzi Ridge. It’s gnarly, and it’s not easy to descend in bad conditions. It’s colder than Everest, because it’s situated a full eight degrees of latitude farther north, the equivalent of the distance between Charleston, South Carolina, and New York City. On Everest, every spring you can usually count on a stable window of clear weather, when the high jet-stream winds start to get pushed away by the approaching monsoon. But the monsoon doesn’t reach the Karakoram. Instead, you have to throw the dice with the weather. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get a single prolonged spell of good days all summer.
During the climbing campaigns of 1987, 1988, and 1989, no fewer than fifty-three climbers reached the summit of Mount Everest. In that same three-year period, although fifteen different expeditions, including some of the best mountaineers in the world, attacked K2, not a single person got to the summit. I’m not surprised.
Many climbers have made repeat ascents of Everest, including me with my seven. The record holder, Apa Sherpa, upped his own total of Everest summits to nineteen in 2009. But as of May 2009, only three climbers have gotten to the top of K2 more than once, each of them making only a second ascent.
The ultimate barrier on K2, I think, is psychological. If you’ve been fortunate enough to hold the holy grail of mountaineering briefly in your hands, you don’t want to get greedy and try to take it home with you. If you do, as with Sir Gawain and Sir Lancelot in the Arthurian legend, only bad things will happen.
In recent years, there’s been gloomy talk about whether K2 will soon be “trivialized” the way Everest has been. The South Col route on Everest is now usually strung every spring with fixed ropes, in a continuous chain from advance base camp to the summit. That hasn’t happened yet on the Abruzzi Ridge on K2, but there’s no saying it couldn’t sometime soon. The expectations of last year’s climbers that the Bottleneck and the traverse at the top of it had to be strung with fixed ropes indicates a huge mental shift from the 1990s.
A few paying clients have gone on K2 expeditions in recent years. As far as I know, none has gotten to the summit. But the gloomy observers predict a future in which guide services will charge affluent wannabes big bucks to be hauled up the Abruzzi. If those outfits hire Sherpa or Hunzas to fix the ropes and pitch the camps, and if they routinely use supplemental oxygen, then K2 will move toward the situation Everest is now in. Fixed ropes are the linchpin for commercial guiding, for if a client only has to slide his jumar up one rope after another, rather than actually climb the rock and ice, a formidable challenge is reduced to a treadmill test of stamina. It’s inevitable, I think, that companies will try to commercialize K2, especially now that it’s becoming a “sexier” prize than Everest. And that will be a sad day for mountaineering.
Another recent trend on Everest is the bagging of “firsts” that range from the monumental to the absurd. For the critics, this is one more measure of the mountain’s trivialization. The first winter ascent, the first descent by ski and by snowboard, even the first descent by parapente represented truly skillful and extreme deeds. But within the last ten years, Everest has been climbed by a blind man, by a double amputee, by a seventy-one-year-old man, and by a fifteen-year-old Sherpa. The speed record for Everest keeps getting ratcheted downward.
It frightens me when I hear from people who say they want to be the first this or the first that on Everest; often they ask for my endorsement. Those are not good reasons to climb the mountain, so I always decline. These folks obviously hope to garner attention, rather than just to be on the mountain for the joy of the experience. Climbing the mountain for its own sake should be reason enough to go there.
Still, the firsts continue to proliferate. It’s gotten so that Everest expeditions in search of sponsors will cook up “firsts” so arcane that any experienced climber would laugh at them—except that they seem to be effective fund-raising gimmicks. Such develop
ments may be in the cards for K2, but I wonder. Skiing down the mountain, for instance, strikes me as extremely difficult and scary but conceivable. Who knows what the next generation will pull off? Indeed, in 2001, the great Tyrolean climber Hans Kammerlander planned to ski down the Abruzzi after a solo ascent. But after teaming up with J.-C. Lafaille to struggle up the route in hideous conditions, he changed his mind about strapping on his skis for the descent.
In 1980, a Polish expedition accomplished the first winter ascent of Everest, as Krzysztof Wielicki and Leszek Cichy reached the top by the South Col route on February 17. This was a genuine landmark, one of the great feats in Everest history. So far, there have been two attempts on K2 in winter, both by Polish teams, in 1987 and 2003. The second effort, led by Wielicki, fought to an altitude of 25,000 feet on the Abruzzi Ridge before throwing in the towel. I suspect that this tantalizing “first” will be accomplished by someone in the next five to ten years.
I climbed Gasherbrum I with Wielicki in 1995, after my partner Rob Hall had gone home. It was simply by chance that Wielicki and I met on the mountain, but as a partner he was a man you could trust and rely on. He loved being in the mountains, and he was like a tiger on the hill. I can only imagine how strong he was in the 1980s, when he was at the top of his game. I would gladly go on another expedition with Krzysztof if the opportunity arose.
I believe it will be the Poles, with their legendary stamina, tolerance for pain, and tenacity, who will be the first to get up K2 in winter. They seem willing to go back time and time again until they succeed. But even so, a future triumph will depend on phenomenally good conditions during the winter the climbers mount their attack.
On Everest, every plausible route—except the Fantasy Ridge, a line on the east face to the right of the two routes that have already been climbed—has been knocked off. On K2, there are still a number of high-quality routes awaiting their first ascents, including the east face and the complete northwest ridge. And the passion to put up first solo ascents of difficult routes is alive and well on the world’s second-highest mountain.
In recent years, helicopter rescue has—thanks to some astonishingly gutsy aerial feats by Nepalese and Pakistani pilots—begun to transform the game all over the Himalaya. There is already evidence that some self-styled hero-alpinists are willing to stick their necks out on 8,000ers farther than they otherwise would, as they count on choppers to get them out of trouble. This is, on the whole, a deplorable trend, for the pilots, who routinely go nameless in the media, risk their own lives to save showboating climbers who are only after personal glory.
If you doubt whether aerial rescue can transform an exploratory “game,” just look at the north and south poles. For centuries, the poles were the most remote places on earth, and such genuine heroes as Amundsen, Scott, and Peary gave everything they had to reach them by the best means available—sleds, dogs, and skis. Nowadays you can book a trip to skydive over the north pole or be flown there to compete in a marathon. Ninety degrees north can be “bagged” in merely a long weekend away from your home in suburban America. There are still daring explorers pushing new “firsts” in the Arctic and the Antarctic, although when they get in trouble, they are routinely spirited to safety by helicopters.
Will choppers transform climbing on K2, or is altitude an impenetrable barrier for aircraft? It remains to be seen. No climber has yet been lifted by helicopter from the summit of Everest, but a few years ago a nervy French pilot touched down there; with his rotors still going and only one skid balanced on the summit, he stayed for several minutes before peeling off into the empyrean. No one could have safely jumped aboard and been whisked to safety, as the helicopter was already at its limit. But who knows what the next few years may bring.
For me, it would be a sad turn of events if helicopters could pluck stranded climbers off the highest summits. In the last decade, cell phones have transformed the rescue of backcountry hikers and climbers in the United States. A lot of folks go out now believing that if they get into trouble, all they have to do is dial 911. God forbid if the same thing came to pass on the 8,000ers. I’ve always liked the sense of disconnection from the rest of the world that I get on high peaks, and the self-reliance that imposes, as I realize that my safety depends entirely on my own careful decision making. There aren’t many places left on earth where a rescue by outsiders is still literally impossible.
It’s clear that in recent times, climbers on 8,000ers, like some of the ones stranded in August 2008 above the Bottleneck, have simply sat down to await a rescue from other climbers. Such a thing was always inconceivable to me. On all my expeditions, I said to myself, If I get in trouble here, it’s my problem to get myself out. In a way, I kind of liked that mandate. It made me test myself. It taught me self-confidence. And in the end, it made me a more conservative climber.
I’ll never forget peering over the ridge crest on the summit slope on Dhaulagiri in 1999, and suddenly seeing a dead man sprawled in the snow. That was another wake-up call. As I fought down the shiver that crawled up my spine, I vowed, “Ed, if you fuck up, that’ll be you lying there.”
For several years after 1998, there was a macabre mystique about women and K2. By that date, only five women had reached the summit: Wanda Rutkiewicz, Liliane Barrard, Julie Tullis, Chantal Mauduit, and Alison Hargreaves. And by 1998, all five were dead. Barrard and Tullis died descending the Abruzzi in 1986, as did Hargreaves in 1995, when she was apparently blown off the mountain by a tremendous gust of wind. (Hargreaves’s death caused a huge and to my mind ridiculous furor in her native Great Britain, where she was posthumously censured—by the popular press, not the climbing community—for leaving two small children motherless. Any number of male climbers over the decades, including Mallory, have done the same, without being tarred and feathered as irresponsible fathers.) Then Rutkiewicz died on Kangchenjunga in 1992, and Mauduit on Dhaulagiri in 1998.
The fact that no woman alive had climbed K2 sparked a competition among a small sorority of ambitious female alpinists. Jennifer Jordan wrote a popular book called (here we go again!) Savage Summit, chronicling the life stories of the five who had climbed K2 and died. And in 2002, her husband, Jeff Rhoads, organized an expedition to the mountain, while Jordan made a film, called Women of K2, that pivoted around Araceli Segarra’s attempt to become the sixth woman to get up the mountain, thereby breaking what was already being called “the curse of the women of K2.”
Araceli was one of the on-camera stars of David Breashears’s IMAX film about Everest in 1996. She’s a strong climber and a great teammate, and she also happens to be beautiful enough to make a living as a model in her native Spain. Her effort on the Cesen route, however, was turned back by weather and snow conditions at only 23,300 feet. It was on this expedition that Jordan and Rhoads discovered the remains of Dudley Wolfe on the Godwin Austen Glacier.
Despite Araceli’s failure to climb K2, the film won several awards. It also provoked an odd backlash among feminists, who thought that what Jordan was saying was that women simply aren’t good enough to climb K2 safely. She was dumbfounded, since her real point was to dramatize just how dangerous a mountain K2 is, for men as well as for women.
The so-called curse produced a far more opportunistic response than Jordan’s film, when a publicity-hungry American climber named Heidi Howkins published a book called K2: One Woman’s Quest for the Summit, about how she planned to climb K2. Give me a break! Do the climb first, then write the book! Howkins never did get very high on the mountain, but that didn’t prevent National Geographic Explorer from making a film about her self-styled “quest.” It was titled (wouldn’t you know it?) Savage Summits.
As of May 2009, no American woman has yet climbed K2. This is a first that will undoubtedly keep a heated rivalry alive until some female mountaineer from this country pulls off the feat.
Meanwhile, in 2004, a Spanish woman, Edurne Pasabán, quietly ended the curse, as she reached the summit by the Abruzzi Ridge as part of an Ital
ian-Spanish team. At the moment, she stands tied with the Austrian climber Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, both of whom have climbed twelve of the fourteen 8,000ers. Back in the 1980s, a lot of people thought that Wanda Rutkiewicz would be the first woman to join the elite company of men who had completed all fourteen. She was way ahead of any other woman in the world, in terms of 8,000ers on her résumé. But seventeen years after Rutkiewicz’s death, no woman has yet completed the list.
Because they are Europeans, and because they don’t have the kinds of publicity machines up and running that Heidi Howkins (or for that matter, Reinhold Messner) deployed, this friendly competition—and both women insist it is friendly—has flown under the radar in the United States. But I think it’s an interesting and admirable challenge, and I’m following it pretty closely. I’d be the first to congratulate Pasabán or Kaltenbrunner the minute either woman joins our little club, of which at last count there are still only sixteen members.
In a postscript I wrote for the paperback edition of No Shortcuts to the Top, I admitted that after my eighteen-year-long campaign to climb all fourteen 8,000ers had come to a close, there were times when I felt at loose ends. Appearances on shows such as The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart were fun and gratifying, as were the numerous letters and e-mails I got from readers, and the enthusiastic receptions that often greeted my slide shows and “inspirational” talks. But I didn’t really envision my future as that of an after-dinner speaker, living off an endless recounting of the climbs I’d done in my prime. I enjoy those speaking events, but I still need to push myself physically and mentally in the outdoors. The future would seem empty to me if I had no more mountains to climb.
Since May 2005, when I returned from Annapurna, I’ve also found other kinds of adventures to keep my juices flowing. One was running the New York City Marathon with Paula in November 2006. As much fun as the run itself (notwithstanding all the sore muscles we strained on that twenty-six-mile course) were the weeks of training together near our home on Bainbridge Island. Paula and I were able to share a workout regimen with a common goal in a more satisfying way than we could ever share 8,000-meter expeditions.