To the Edges of the Earth

by Edward J. Larson

  FROM SKARDU, THE WAY went north and then east through the Shigar and Braldoh river valleys to Askoley, the last settlement before the eastern Karakoram. After crossing the Indus on barges, the duke’s party began this five-day stretch with one hundred twenty-six porters and fifty-six packhorses but left the horses behind when crossing the Braldoh River on small rafts constructed from branches tied to inflated animal skins. At both Skardu and Shigar, local rajas welcomed the duke with bands, banquets, and polo matches. Although the route was lined with tall peaks, the valley walls were too high and the clouds too low to reveal the full panorama.

  Askoley, which the Italians depicted as “a poor village indeed, and certainly one of the dirtiest in all Baltistan,” stood over 10,000 feet high.17 Behind it was a bleak, stony valley blocked by snows for eight months each year. Beyond that lay the world’s largest subpolar glacial network. The Italians felt they had reached the end of the known world, with only terra nova ahead. Theirs was the first party to reach the village in 1909 and they received a warm welcome. Virtually every able-bodied man and boy in the region, and some that were not able-bodied, asked to serve as porters into the Karakoram. Local shepherds went ahead with sheep and goats to supply the expedition with fresh milk and meat. Displaced, the Kashmiri porters returned home. The British had warned the duke not to mix Kashmiri with Balti porters because the former were Sunni and the latter Shiite, and each accused the other of performing human sacrifice and other bloody rites. After working with them, the duke dismissed such charges and concluded that both could serve as proper mountain porters.

  On May 15, the duke dispatched nearly a hundred fifty Balti porters with half of the expedition’s supplies into the broad, rock-strewn valley running east from Askoley. The Italians followed a day later with over two hundred more Balti porters, making it the largest expedition ever to enter the Karakoram. “We now once more made our way across the shingle and pebbles of the valley bottom, but no longer the narrow gorge it was below Askoley, but over a mile wide and quite level,” De Filippi wrote.18 After passing the 300-foot-thick snout of the Biafo Glacier, which entered from a tributary valley on the north, they continued until the various parts of the expedition converged on May 17 at the base of the 2-mile-wide Baltoro Glacier, which all but blocked the valley floor. Its surface covered by rocky debris carried down by tributary glaciers and fallen from the steep mountains standing on either side, the glacier lay “like a huge black monster crouching with flattened back in the bottom of the valley,” according to De Filippi.19 Furrows of white showed through the gray mantle. A slow-moving river of ice nearly 40 miles long, the Baltoro Glacier descended at a steady 3.5-degree grade from 16,000 feet above sea level at its eastern summit to 11,000 feet at its western terminus. Once the expedition entered the glaciated regions of the Karakoram, it never encountered another person.

  Marching east up the glacier, the expedition now labored alternately across its rough surface and a narrow marginal moraine winding along its south side. The Italians preferred the glacier; the porters favored the moraine. Either way, it was hard going on tortuous footing, especially for the livestock, which had nothing to eat for three days. After about 30 miles, the moraine rose above the glacial surface and broadened out at a large rockfall called Urdukas or, then, Rdokass. With boulders as large as houses, level terraces where scrubby grasses gave a matlike surface, and a mountain stream, Urdukas provided a made-to-order supply center for a large expedition with livestock. About two-thirds of the way between Askoley and the dramatic confluence of three glaciers at what Martin Conway called the Place de la Concorde, or “Concordia,” after a similar juncture in the Alps, the duke made Urdukas a hub for his operations in the Karakoram. Due to its placement in the steep-sided Lower Baltoro, it offered only a limited view of the surrounding peaks and none whatsoever of K2, though the camp did boast a stunning vista of the valley walls.

  His goal nearby if not yet within sight, the duke settled in for a two-month-long siege of K2 and the eastern Karakoram. No longer needing a large retinue, he sent two hundred Balti porters back to Askoley. Another one hundred fifty went on with him to establish a base camp at the southern foot of K2, with all but ten of these then returning to Askoley. The shepherds with their flocks and twenty-five porters remained with Baines at Urdukas to resupply the climbing party. No more lavish expedition had ever entered the Karakoram. Indeed, only from this point on did the duke give up his portable bed for a sleeping bag. Fresh meat, milk, and eggs continued, however.

  With the vast resources of the Italian crown supporting his effort, the duke tried to anticipate every contingency, but like the fabled King Canute, he could not control the elements. Weather remained his main concern, though he did what he could to deal with it. “The night was very cold,” the duke wrote about the first evening spent by the Italians at Urdukas. “In our triple-layered sleeping bags of goatskin, camelhair, and eiderdown, we could defy Arctic temperatures. Not so our porters, who were forced to take shelter from the cold by crouching under waxed canvas.”20 In a foretaste of what was to come, a furious late-spring blizzard held up the duke’s party at Urdukas for two days.

  On May 23, the Italians and their Balti porters started their 15-mile, two-day trek from Urdukas to Concordia, where the Godwin-Austen and Vigne glaciers flow into the Baltoro. “The meeting point of these three glaciers forms an immense basin offering a spectacle of incomparable Alpine beauty,” the duke reported.21 It provides readier access to and better views of more lofty summits than any place on earth—a 360-degree panorama that includes seven of the world’s highest peaks, all over 25,000 feet, some 10,000 feet higher than Mont Blanc. Nevertheless, K2 steals the show.

  “Suddenly,” De Filippi wrote upon stepping into the Concordia basin, “the wide Godwin-Austen valley lay before us in its whole length. Down at the end, alone, detached from all the other mountains, soared up K2, the indisputable sovereign of the region, gigantic and solitary.” Arriving late on May 24, the Italians were dumbstruck by their first view of it. “For a whole hour we stood absorbed.”22 In the gathering darkness, K2 stood in full profile, some 12,000 feet from base camp to summit. A steep, four-sided pyramid of gray granite and gleaming glaciers, it reminded the Italians of a massively oversized Matterhorn. The duke was in sight of his pole.

  “It was a world of ice and cliffs, a grand view that, while it would please an artist, alarmed the alpinist,” he wrote.23

  THE NEXT MORNING GAVE the Italians their first panoramic view of the surrounding landscape. The clouds that had partially obscured it during the prior evening gave way to a diffuse mist that seemed to sharpen features rather than dull them. “Like a crystal breathed upon” was how De Filippi described the morning air, through which they now saw the towering mountain chains and broad glacial valleys radiating outward from the central basin. “So inconceivably vast are the structural lines of the landscape, that the idea comes into one’s mind of being in the workshop of nature, and of standing before the primeval chaos and cosmos of a world as yet unvisited by the phenomenon of life,” he wrote. “It is comparable to the polar regions in this respect, but in no other, for instead of the monotonous horizons of the far north, all the landscape around K2 has the richest variety of design.”24

  Vastness is the operative word linking the Karakoram to the polar regions. Just as Peary, Shackleton, and Mawson complained that they could not judge heights or distances in the far north or south, so too the Italians inevitably found landmarks in the Karakoram farther away and larger than they first appeared. “We had no standards of comparison, and the glaciers and valleys are so well adjusted in their proportions to the surrounding mountains that it was hard to realize the absolute size of any object,” De Filippi wrote. “All of this was revealed to us gradually, by dint of daily contemplation and detailed observation, most of all by repeated failures in estimating heights and distances. Thus it happened that our amazement, instead of diminishing with familiarity, grew greater every day.”25 He r
emained at Concordia with Negrotto and Sella for the day to map and photograph the surroundings.

  Drawn more to adventure than scenery, on May 25 the duke marched ahead for 6 miles over the Godwin-Austen Glacier with the alpine guides and most of the Balti porters to set up their base camp beneath K2’s southern face. “The location could not be better,” the duke wrote. “Sheltered from avalanches and winds, the view is dominated by the lower part of the Godwin-Austen Glacier and the great Concordia basin” spreading outward to the south and the 2-mile-high rock face of K2 rising abruptly in the north.26

  The others followed a day later. “The immense [mountain] chains rose all about us,” De Filippi wrote of his trek up the glacial valley. “The mountains have all the bold design to be seen anywhere in the Alps—the barren precipices, the snowy slopes and the upward thrust of slender peaks, the ample curving cornices, the multiform broken architecture of séracs, and the overweighted glaciers hanging on vertical rocks,” but on a grand scale “that seems to beggar the human imagination.”27 Despite the summits on both sides, including the massive 26,400-foot Broad Peak to the east, it was K2, looming directly ahead, that mesmerized them.

  By the time the other Italians reached the base camp, the duke had already reconnoitered the southwest flank of K2 with two guides and sent Alexis Brocherel with three others along its east side. While no one found an obvious route to the summit, the duke reported, “The news brought back by Brocherel, while not optimal, was more encouraging than ours.”28 He had found a rocky ridge running from the southeast to the mountain’s eastern shoulder that appeared possible if not promising, though from below he could not discern a path from the shoulder to the top. For his part, the duke had discovered a long route around to a northwestern ridge that might shelter a climbable snowfield on its far side. Some 16,500 feet above sea level at the base camp, any route to the 28,250-foot summit would be treacherous.

  After reviewing the options, the duke chose Brocherel’s route on what became known as the Abruzzi Spur. His plan involved making a high camp at a reddish outcrop on the ridge about 3,500 vertical feet above the valley floor, and then climbing to the shoulder, which stood over 25,000 feet high. Simply reaching it would set a new altitude record. The duke made this attempt with seven Italian guides, leaving the others below.

  As it turned out, the duke could not even reach the reddish outcrop. Setting out on May 30, he camped for the first night at 18,245 feet. From there, the guides tried to find a way up on three successive days, going farther each day—surely over 20,000 feet on one or two occasions—but returned despondent. The rock crumbled beneath their feet, the ridge narrowed to a precarious crest, the weather deteriorated, and the perspective baffled them. “Slabs of rock which at a few yards distant looked like gentle and easy inclines, turned out to be little less than perpendicular,” they reported, and the reddish outcrop receded before their eyes.29

  “The guides finally came to the reluctant conclusion that it was useless to proceed further, not because they had encountered insurmountable obstacles,” De Filippi explained, “but because it was hopeless to think of bringing so long and formidable an ascent to a successful issue, when from the very first steps they had met with such difficulties.”30 From what the guides told him, the duke noted, “I understood that to carry our supplies even with reduced loads and to overcome the difficulties that would be encountered, it would have taken weeks, not days.”31 Despite the setback, he had chosen the best way. Forty-five years later, an Italian party used the Abruzzi Spur to make the first-ever successful ascent of K2. It remains the standard route.

  Returning to the base camp on June 4, the duke now tried his western route. All of the Italians and most of the Balti porters moved around K2’s southwestern flank to an advance camp at 18,176 feet near the midpoint of a tributary glacier that the duke named Savoia for his homeland. “At this height,” De Filippi observed with some surprise, “we not only found ourselves in perfect condition, but could actually breathe more easily here than at the [16,500-foot] base camp.”32 A scientist as well as a physician, De Filippi was gaining deeper insight into acclimatation and altitude sickness. At this point, he attributed the easier breathing in part to relatively better air circulation at the higher camp.

  Thickly covered with fresh snow, the 10-mile-long Savoia Glacier hugged the mountain’s west face, which rose from base to summit at a staggering 60-degree pitch. “We could see its entire west wall, splotched with snow, but so steep that no glacier could cling to it,” De Filippi observed.33 Making this move into the Savoia Valley in marginal weather, the Italians soon saw conditions worsen so much that they could not even see the summit, much less try to reach it. The wind rose to gale force, avalanches thundered down the mountainsides, heavy snow fell, and the temperature plummeted to near zero.

  Forced by the weather to remain in camp much of the time, they took advantage of every clear opportunity. On the one truly fine day during this period, June 7, while Sella took some of the most stunning photographs ever captured of K2, the duke with three guides set off for the saddle at the valley’s northern terminus. There, he hoped to view the mountain’s north face and perhaps find a route up it. After a long march through knee-deep snow, this effort ended with a near-vertical climb up an ice wall to the pass at nearly 22,000 feet. From here, they could go no farther. The far side dropped off steeply, towering pinnacles blocked the ridge, and a cornice barred access to or even a view of the north face.

  On June 8, the Italians withdrew to their base camp on the Godwin-Austen Glacier, where they remained for four days preparing for their next move. Since reaching the Karakoram, they had not had more than two consecutive days of good weather. For his part, De Filippi lamented, he had never felt “so alone, so isolated, so completely ignored by nature,” and he had been with the duke on both the Saint Elias and the Ruwenzori expeditions.34 Now they would probe K2’s east face.

  Still hoping to summit, the duke established a new advance camp 4 miles farther north on the steeply rising, deeply crevassed Godwin-Austen Glacier. “K2, with its steep flanks swept clean by avalanches and its summit cone covered with ice, reveals itself here in all its splendor,” the duke wrote.35

  At over 18,600 feet above sea level, the camp stood beneath a dip in the valley’s eastern wall opposite K2. The party climbed to this dip for an unobstructed view of the mountains and glaciers to the east, resulting in Sella’s panoramic photograph of the Gasherbrum massif’s three highest 26,000-foot peaks and the distant Teram Kangri. Such images, climbing historians Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver observed, “For the first time made it possible for armchair mountaineers to picture in the mind’s eye the physical scale of the Himalaya.” With them, they added, “Photography disclosed its full potential and began to displace lengthy narrative as the conventional way of marking individual and collective achievement in the mountains.”36

  Massive spring avalanches crashed down continuously from the nearby heights during the party’s two-week stay in the upper Godwin-Austen, unnerving everyone. Storms raged. Looking at the mountain from the east, De Filippi commented on its changed appearance. “The whole cone is covered with ice, above which just show the low, little accented rocky ridges converging to the top. The wall, at a very steep angle of inclination, is live ice for 7,000 feet up, and crowned by séracs,” he wrote. “It is absolutely inaccessible.”37 All hope of climbing K2 from this side evaporated. If anyone is to reach the summit, the duke observed, “It will not be a climber, but an aviator.”38

  Instead, the duke and Sella led alternating marches over the Godwin-Austen Glacier to its terminus at the 20,500-foot-high, aptly named Windy Gap, which opened onto the land beyond. Each carried cameras to capture images of what they could not reach. Trying again to gain a view of K2’s elusive north face, the duke and three guides attempted to climb the narrowing ridge running northwest from Windy Gap to Staircase Peak, but were blocked by steep ice and deep crevasses after gaining little more than 1,000 f
eet. There, at 21,650 vertical feet, the duke snapped the expedition’s classic photograph of K2. Although impatient in the role, he was a fine photographer too.

  Infinitely patient in his work, Sella revolutionized the art of mountain photography. By seizing every chance in the midst of appalling weather and using fragile, large-format glass-plate negatives developed in the field, he captured a series of historic panoramas from Windy Gap toward the north and east. “In Sella’s photographs there is no faked grandeur,” Ansel Adams later commented. “The vastness of the subjects and purity of Sella’s interpretations move the spectator to a definitely religious awe.”39 None of these photos were easily won. The duke made his by climbing to precarious positions, then snapping away. Sella, in contrast, photographed mountains much as portraitists photograph children—waiting with forbearance for the subjects to reveal themselves in telling moods.

  During their fifteen days in the upper Godwin-Austen, howling wind, intense cold, and frequent snowstorms frustrated the Italians at every turn. Only a few days offered even brief moments of good visibility; many offered none. “For an entire week encamped under K2,” the duke reported, “we never saw the summit.”40 De Filippi wrote of wind piercing the thickest woolens. Ever the perfectionist, Sella stood for hours in exposed positions, teeth chattering and feet stomping, hoping for the clouds to part enough to show a mountain as only an artist could see it. The Balti porters suffered miserably in their loose garments and visibly shook from the cold when they paused from marching.