The Last Step

by Rick Ridgeway

  Upriver, we could see all 350 porters coming back, along the same bank they had left that morning. They had encountered a lateral tributary swollen in the thaw and had been unable to get across it. Now the only choice was to haul each of them, one at a time, over on the T-bar.

  There is a story in the Koran that says all men who die must cross a tenuous bridge before they may enter heaven. Those who fail the test fall off the bridge and plunge into the abyss of hell, condemned forever. Many of our porters were deep in prayer as we tied them to the T-bar and launched them, bobbing madly on the stretchy nylon rope, across the roaring water. A few panicked and grabbed the stationary span rope; we had to yank hard to break loose their hands. At least one porter started jerking and flipped upside down. But the safety belt held him to the T-bar.

  We worked late into the night.

  The next morning, after just a few hours’ sleep and before first light, John Roskelley and Sadiq Ali were back at work. Through the second day we hauled men and gear; by that night the job was finished. All the porters were on the far shore, huddled around small fires, cooking chapatties and brewing salt tea. The rest of us scattered, spread our bags on the sand, and spent another night under the bright canopy of Karakoram stars. The next day we would trek to Paiju camp, beneath the shadows of the first “big” peaks, and within eyesight of the snout of the Baltoro Glacier.

  It was a stage and a half from Jola to Paiju, and by noon we still had some five miles to go. We hiked across the broad alluvium of boulders and rocks, cut by nullahs, with granite peaks and glaciers above the valley walls. Though we were entering the region of high mountains and hiking at about ten thousand feet, it was still desert. Sage, wild rose, and a scant, stubby grass clung to the dry hillsides. We stopped occasionally to scan the bordering hills for signs of Siberian ibex or shapu (a mountain sheep), both said to frequent the area, but we saw only the remains of one of these big sheep, next to the trail. Perhaps it was the kill of a snow leopard, also said to occur here, but so elusive and rare a species that only a handful of Westerners have had the privilege of seeing this blue-eyed big cat.

  The sky was still clear overhead but clouds were forming down the valley. In the other direction, toward the head of the Baltoro Glacier, there were lenticular clouds, looking like alien flying saucers. That morning we had noticed the air darkening with a high, windblown dust, yellowish and ominous, apparently carried aloft from the endless deserts of China’s Sinkiang. Up high there was strong wind, but at the valley floor the air was still and warm.

  We crested the border of a nullah and walked a ridge that afforded a view of the valley both forward and behind. Now a few clouds gathered above. The first wisp of wind from the high mountains cooled our skin. We stopped to admire the view, and someone pointed to the head of the valley, many miles beyond. In the distance, we could see a large peak with a lenticular cloud suspended above and to leeward. A white plume trailed from its summit. The mountain looked different from the others; it had the unmistakable look of one of the earth’s great ones, the look of an eight-thousand-meter peak. We checked our map and determined it to be Broad Peak, 26,400 feet. Five of us were gathered: Diana Jagersky, Skip Edmonds, Jim Wickwire, Chris Chandler, and me. Together we stared at the giant. There is magic in the first glimpse of a major mountain, a feeling of awe before the most powerful architecture on the earth’s surface.

  The wind from a darkening squall brought drops of rain, raising from the desert floor the musky aroma of sage. We hiked on, but not for half an hour before we were again brought to stop. Now we had another view up the valley, and we could see another mountain next to Broad Peak. It did not seem possible, but this great pyramid dwarfed its neighbor. We were fifty miles away: even that distance did not diminish its grandeur. It stood alone, lording over its domain, rising singular to an altitude that seemed mythical. It was our first glimpse of the mountain for which we had traveled so far: K2.

  We unshouldered packs, sat on stones, and stared. There was an air of reverence. The only words were a few whispered comments:

  “I can’t believe anything could be so big.”

  “Look at that high cirrus cloud girdling the peak at about eight thousand meters—and the summit rises well above it.”

  “It’s so impressive standing alone. It isn’t surrounded by satellite peaks like Everest.”

  The feeling common to all was humility mixed with, perhaps, not a little apprehension.

  We opened our lunch sacks and snacked on kippers and crackers and cheese spread. My thoughts drifted to an evening three days before, in Askole. We had camped with part of Bonington’s team, on their way home. To climbers, their names had household familiarity: Tut Braithwaite, Pete Boardman, Joe Tasker. Together, they were the most peripatetic climbing group in the world, with a long list of major accomplishments: Annapurna, Changabang, the Ogre, and Everest. The first ascent of the huge southwest face of Everest, in 1975, had been their foremost achievement. Tut Braithwaite and Nick Estcourt had led the difficult rock band, the key to the summit that had thwarted all previous attempts; Doug Scott and Dougal Haston had first reached the summit, followed by Pete Boardman. Pete was only twenty-three at the time, the youngest member of Bonington’s team.

  It was one of Boardman’s comments that I remembered now. We had been around the campfire drinking coffee, smoking hash, and swapping stories. Conversation had wandered from Patagonia to the Orinoco Jungle to New Guinea, but eventually we had landed on the subject that was most on our minds: K2. (The British are known for laconic understatement, and British climbers practice this to a fine art. The most horrendous climb in the Alps or in the Himalaya—when the story comes out—is nothing more than “a bit of a nasty climb, but a fine outing.” The most hair-raising scene imaginable—a climber out a hundred feet on a lead rope, unable to find protection with his pitons, legs starting to shake and knuckles white—is dismissed with: “Oh, yes, it was a bit gripping that, but I was doing fine until I dropped me matches and couldn’t light me fag. Then it got a bit nasty.”)

  We had listened to Bonington’s group describe K2; for those of us who had not been on the 1975 team, it was our first close-hand knowledge of what we were getting into. Boardman said, “I think we were all a bit surprised. Didn’t quite expect it you know, to be such a bloody big climb. I think we probably underestimated it a little, there just weren’t enough of us, and we realized right off there was no way we could get up it. Too much hard climbing too high. Tut was laid up with some nastiness in his lungs, then with the avalanche we had to pack it in. That’s quite a hill; I don’t think any of us have ever seen anything quite like it. It’s a phenomenal hill.”

  Looking up at K2, so enormous even from fifty miles away, and thinking of Boardman’s description, “a phenomenal hill,” combined to give that feeling of humility: there was no room for conceit before a mountain such as K2. It was also the meeting with Bonington’s group that, more than anything, gave us the feeling of apprehension: Before learning of Estcourt’s death we had all commented that K2, for a big mountain, should be a relatively safe climb. Unlike Everest there would be no icefall—a dangerous section of glacier where the ice moves over steep underlying bedrock, causing blocks to break and shift and sometimes squash climbers—and since we would most of the time be on a ridge, there should not be any danger of avalanches falling from above. But it was not an avalanche from above that killed Estcourt; it was a slab from a snowfield that broke under his feet. Now, there was no way we could rationalize away the dangers of K2.

  I squeezed the last of a tube of cheese spread on a cracker. The cirrus around K2 were lowering and the mountain was almost gone, enveloped in the clouds. I wondered what our chances were of reaching the summit. I remembered how hard it had been three years before, on Everest, to climb at twenty-six thousand feet, even with oxygen. There, we had had help from Sherpas to carry the oxygen and other equipment to the upper camps. The climbing was less steep, too, with no real technical sections on t
he upper reaches. On K2, there would be hard ground the whole distance.

  The mountain disappeared from view. “That was quite a sight,” Jim Wickwire said. “That mountain is just as impressive as the first time I saw it in ’75. It’s going to be interesting to see how we do.”

  I shouldered my pack and started hiking. I thought about the Poles, who had attempted the ridge we were going to try back in 1976. Nineteen extremely strong, tough climbers had turned back. I would not admit it to the others, but I could not imagine how we could expect to do much better. It just seemed too high and too steep. And without Sherpas. . . . I put the thoughts out of mind. I recalled a pithy statement attributed to the famous woman climber, Beverly Johnson: “Climbing mountains is like eating an elephant. You have do it one bite at a time.” We would just have to keep taking bites and see how far we could get. Ahead, about two miles away, I could see a grove of trees and grass. It was Paiju camp, the destination of that day’s march.

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  THE BOOK OF MARVELS

  ONE OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST BOOKS is an illustrated work not found on any list of classics, and it is never included in any college lit course. But it has inspired several generations of young boys and girls with a feeling of magic and mystery, a vision of secret places in the far corners of the earth where it might still be possible, in a distant oriental bazaar, or a secluded caravansary, to purchase an old, greening lamp that, if rubbed in just the right way, combined with just the right incantation, will produce a genie. Today, when I thumb through Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels, I am struck with those same childhood lusts for travel, those same visions of Petra and Samarkand and Baalbek, of genies and flying carpets and the stone eyes of the sphinx staring across the deserts of time.

  The trek into the inner sanctum of the Karakoram, into the icy upper reaches of the Baltoro, was a trek into the pages of the Book of Marvels. The Baltoro Glacier began two miles above Paiju camp, a tongue of ice hundreds of feet thick, sticking out into the valley floor. On the tip of the tongue was a large hole, also hundreds of feet across, and from this hole sprang full-born the Braldu River. It was a mammoth spout of water gushing from the guts of the glacier, meltwater beginning its journey down the Braldu to the Shigar to the Indus to the Arabian Sea. On top of the glacier, the ice was covered with a layer of gray and black and brown rocks fallen from centuries of landslides off the bordering slopes—glacial moraine—and there were few places of exposed ice. Had we had an aerial view of the glacier (as we would in the weeks ahead from the upper flanks of K2) we would have seen the rocks arranged in stripes that ran parallel lanes down the glacier, like dividers on a giant ice highway; the stripes of lateral glaciers would merge with the stripes of the bigger Baltoro Glacier, and each stripe would be a geological fingerprint of the origin of each glacier. Together, they would suggest slow, inexorable movement.

  The trail through the moraine was at times thin and indistinct, and if we did not watch closely for slight footprints on occasional mats of soil, it was easy to lose the way. Often we hopped from boulder to boulder, then up steep, rock-covered ice flanks and down the other side. There were crevasses, but on this lower end of the long glacier they were infrequent, and the ones we did see were never covered or hidden; there was little danger of falling in one and no need to wear ropes. If I found myself alone, I would stop to listen. The only sound would be occasional rocks falling down ice banks and ridges, and now and again a pop or groan from pressure building and releasing deep in the glacier.

  The magnificence of the peaks on all points of the Baltoro Glacier evokes storybook fantasies. Paiju Peak, 21,654 feet, rises in columns of joined spires connected by gulleys and ramps, and each feature is fringed in snow. The next group of peaks—the Trango Towers—dominates the area above the snout of the Baltoro. The Trangos are distinct from other peaks: granite towers boldly lined with massive joints, vertical walls of rock, four thousand feet high. One of these peaks, appropriately called Nameless Tower, is a pipedream image of the perfect mountain spire—a shaft of granite, vertical on all sides, rising in an unbroken twenty-five-hundred-foot column to an altitude of twenty thousand feet. It has been climbed but once and no doubt will be the focus of many more attempts in the future.

  Even on the glacier we still hiked in heat, and most continued to wear short pants and loose cotton shirts. Skip Edmonds had brought a laundry bushel of pressed blue surgeons’ shirts stamped “University of Washington Hospital”; most found them comfortable in the heat, but they gave us the look of interns on a hiking trip. On the second day on the glacier, we crossed an area of hard, blue ice for some reason not covered by rocks, and the chilled air radiated up and cooled our legs. We found a freshet of meltwater running in an ice channel; this sweet water was the first we considered safe to drink without adding bitter iodine purification tablets. Since the iodine went into even cooking water, its taste permeated everything, and it was a great pleasure to be rid of it.

  That afternoon we would reach Urdukas—a Balti word meaning “split rock,” after a huge broken boulder overlooking the campsite. I was hiking that afternoon with Jim Whittaker and Dianne Roberts. Jim still wore his Gilgit cap and yachting pants. Like most of us, he hiked with an aluminum ski pole (donated by K2 Skis) that functioned as a hiking stick. He carried a bright red Kelty pack, usually loaded with most of his personal gear. Although he could have given all his gear to porters, Jim, like most of us, wanted to carry a few pounds every day to keep his legs honed. Dianne hoped to stay light so she could dart off the trail after good photos, but her assortment of cameras and lenses filled her pack.

  Dianne was thirty years old, round-faced and rosy-cheeked. She had smartly trimmed short brown hair and hiked each day in khaki shorts and a print blouse covered with a bird-hunter’s vest—the type with small pockets for shotgun shells. She carried film in the shell pockets, though, and the vest’s larger pouches were perfect for lenses. Dianne was a photojournalist, and one of her dreams was to come back with coffee-table-book-quality photos of our expedition and the Karakoram.

  Jim mentioned an incident that morning with one of our five porter group leaders who had had the audacity to ask Dianne for one of her two ski poles. To Jim, it seemed like bad form, especially since the porter already had one ski pole.

  “And there I was,” he said, “with only one ski pole myself—I’d given the other away to another porter—and I have a much heavier load than this guy’s carrying. Just because he is a boss among the porters, he thinks he doesn’t have to carry anything. I really got ticked off, and I gave him the business. He can’t understand English, but he got my point.

  “I can’t believe these people, I guess it’s because they’re so poor, but they constantly expect you to give them things. There’s no end to it. And if you don’t comply they go on strike. I know we’ve been lucky on that so far—Saleem has been a big help. He’s done a good job of keeping them honest, and I know in those speeches he makes to them every day, he tells them if they’re not honest, if they don’t live up to their part of the agreement and get our loads to Base Camp, they’ll pay for it in the next life. Saleem says they’re basically children—no sophistication at all—and you’ve got to treat them like children.”

  “I don’t think that’s exactly fair, Jim,” Dianne said. “Sure, they’re not educated, and maybe not sophisticated, but you can’t blame them for wanting to get all they can out of us. They’re so miserably poor, and they see us come here surrounded by unbelievable wealth. . . . They’re just people, and how can you blame them? Besides, we haven’t really had any problems at all—nothing like ’75.”

  “Knock on wood,” Jim said. “We’ve still got several days to Base Camp. If there are no strikes.”

  “Oh, I don’t think there is anything to worry about, Jim,” Dianne said. “If the porters were going to strike, they would have done it by now.”

  Jim, necessarily, had to look at the Baltis from the point of view of an employer who had hired
them to complete a job; because of the enormous difficulties encountered on the ’75 expedition, it was understandable that at times he would be skeptical of their performance. Dianne, on the other hand, looked at the Baltis with a photographer’s eye. She saw them as visually fascinating and viewed the display of their culture as might an anthropologist. Where Jim saw possible strikes, wage negotiations, and delays, Dianne saw two-page spreads in National Geographic.

  Not to say that Jim was, in any way, a pessimist. He was not necessarily an optimist, either, but more a realist. While he knew there was a good chance we would have a porter strike, he never lost any sleep worrying about it. If it happened, he would deal with it then. He accepted things as they came, and when things went well, that was fine; if they were not so well, he would do what he could to make them right. “Jim just kind of loves life in its entirety,” Dianne once said. “The good, the bad, and the ugly. I guess I’m more of an optimist—I just prefer to see the good.”

  Whatever characteristics were different in the personalities of Jim and Dianne, they were certainly less than the similarities, and as a couple, Jim and Dianne radiated the impression of two people with gears meshing well.

  Jim, Dianne, and I caught up with Jim Wickwire, who had stopped to snack on his lunch rations. He was sitting on a peculiar flat stone, supported on a column of ice maybe three feet high and as thick, with the rock mushrooming over all sides. The sun had melted the glacial snow around the rock, leaving it balanced and looking like a toadstool from Wonderland.