The Last Step

by Rick Ridgeway

  There was silence between the tents, then John’s lip curled in a sly smile.

  “Don’t worry, Cherie,” John called over, “one thing you’ll never get out of me is a rise.”

  John’s humor helped to relieve tension between the tents. Everyone laughed, if a bit cautiously. It was more than a laugh just at the witticism, it was also a laugh at ourselves: for a moment, we had exposed the human foibles—the desires, ambitions, frustrations, fears—that lay in the origin of our quarreling, and, for the moment at least, we forgot the storm and the mountain against which those foibles were pitted. A white flag waved a truce, welcomed by all.

  It was eventually decided that John and I should hold down Camp IV while the others bailed out. Lou would stay in Camp III with Jim, Wick, and Craig; the others would go all the way down to Camp I. When the storm was over John and I would break trail to Camp V while the Camp III crew crossed the traverse to IV then, if possible, made the final carry to Camp V that same day. This would leave us positioned for a summit push two or three days later.

  The others left, and John and I lay in our sleeping bags with only the soft sound of snowflakes sliding down the tent fly. I closed my eyes, visualizing where I was, as if I were a giant zoom lens on a satellite, pulling back to expose the whole scene: a sleeping bag in a tiny tent on a knife-ridge snaking down from the summit of the second highest mountain in the world, on the border between China and Pakistan in the remote vastness of central Asia. Waiting. Waiting out yet another storm, and hoping—on this forty-eighth day that we had been on the mountain—that we would get the four days of clear skies we needed to reach the top. Jim Wickwire, at that moment a mile away in another tent in another camp, wrote:

  The storm frustrates us all. It is a big factor in causing the disputes and squabbles we suffer from. We are all becoming increasingly impatient to wind up this expedition—on a successful note. For nearly a month now, we have had storms and only a few days of clear skies. And we are back in the soup again. Three, four, five days, we aren’t sure how long it will last. But one thing is for sure: if we cannot take maximum advantage of the next clear spell, our chances for the summit will be virtually nil.

  | 8 |

  PROBLEMAS GRANDES

  AUGUST 23. CLOUDS STREAMING UP THE RIDGE from both directions, from Pakistan, from China. Meeting on the crest, roiling, jetting upward, curling, arching downward. A maddening vortex, Dantean Hell, fierce and awesomely beautiful. Day forty-nine on the mountain. Day sixty-three including the approach march.

  It was the most severe storm of the expedition. At Camp III, Jim Wickwire’s altimeter registered a 250-foot gain as the barometric pressure dropped. Gusts hit our tent and pressed the walls down, bending the fiberglass poles to near-breaking, and we held the fabric off our faces with our hands.

  “If the tent goes we’re in big trouble,” John said.

  “Problemas grandes,” I said in my best Spanish, talking loudly above the noise of the storm.

  “Might have to dig a snow cave to survive.”

  “That would ruin my day.”

  We lay in the tent staring at the walls. We could hear the stronger gusts before they hit, and we wondered which would be the one that snapped the tent. The other climbers had descended four days ago. Now they had abandoned Camp III and everyone was in Camp I—everyone except John and me, still holding out at Camp IV.

  We had finished breakfast and there was nothing to do. The nylon walls hummed like a tuning fork, vibrating the air inside so our condensed breath and the steam from the stove oscillated at the same high frequency. There was little to talk about, other than the continuing arguments at Camp I, about which we were updated in daily radio calls from Rob Schaller. We were bored with that subject as well.

  “Could be trouble coming,” I said.

  “You see a tear in the tent?” John perked up.

  “No, I feel the urge coming. Think I will have to go outside.”

  “Well I’m sure as hell not going to let you do it in here.”

  I held off as long as possible, but finally there could be no more procrastinating. I laced my boots, pulled on my jumpsuit, and snapped my parka. Unzipping the door, I exited quickly to minimize spindrift blowing in.

  Relieving oneself in bad weather is one of the most disagreeable aspects of high-altitude climbing. It also provokes the most frequent questions in discussions with nonclimbers—everyone wants to know how you do it. The answer is simple: you unzip and take care of business as fast as you can before you freeze up. That danger—freezing up—is a real one, too. Two weeks earlier, Craig Anderson had suffered frost nip at Camp III and the feeling still had not returned.2 The most innovative solution to the problem that I had witnessed was on the Everest climb. One of the climbers—who shall remain nameless—had eaten large quantities of Lomotil above a certain altitude and was never faced with the horror of dropping his drawers in a blizzard. When Jim Whittaker climbed Everest, however, he was less fortunate. On the summit in a howling gale, he faced the decision of baring himself or somehow mustering willpower to wait. “No sense carrying it all the way down,” he thought, and finished the task in the lee of the south summit, 28,750 feet. Three weeks later, when Barry Bishop reached the summit, he unknowingly skewered the frozen result with his crampon, and carried it partway back to the summit. Jim not only is the first American to climb Everest, but in all probability holds another record as well.

  I finished the job and crawled back into the tent. We had read the only two paperbacks in camp—the second book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (no one had any idea where the other two books were) and a dog-eared, underlined copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Anyway, it was almost time for the midmorning radio call, so John and I discussed the latest disputes. As the storm had continued, so had the controversies. For the past two days—before the final hangers-on at Camp III had descended—the arguments had focused on a revised summit strategy developed by Lou Reichardt and approved by Wickwire and Whittaker.

  Lou’s plan was designed around an immediate summit push the minute the storm let up, using only the people already high on the mountain. Not surprisingly, the people at Camp I were opposed, claiming—with justification—that the plan excluded any contingency for a second assault.

  John and I also were opposed, thinking there would not be enough people to carry the necessary loads to Camp V. The plan depended on Dianne Roberts, who had stayed at Camp III, to deliver an oxygen bottle and some valuable food bags to Camp V, and neither of us were certain she could do it. Lou bristled at our criticism, telling us he felt “betrayed.” John and I fumed back; for the first time there were splits in the A Team.

  But as the weather further deteriorated, those at Camp III had decided to descend; Whittaker had ordered John and me down also, saying there was no longer reason to justify our staying high. We would be better, he had said, waiting at Camp III, so we could break down from there after the storm.

  “O.K.,” I had told Jim. “We have to brew up, collapse the tents, and then we’ll be down.”

  With the radio call over, John had grumbled, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. There will never be enough time to make the top after the storm clears.”

  Not thinking too clearly myself, I had replied, “This time, I’m going to take my personal gear down. I have a feeling we might not ever get up here again—you know, this might be the end of the expedition.”

  That was when John and I had devised our own, even more haphazard and foolish, summit strategy. The controversy fired by that plan was now raging. John had initiated the idea:

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “Messner would never put up with this. That’s why he’s the best. He would just go for it. He’s been screwed on too many of these big expeditions. That’s why now he only climbs with one other guy.”

  There was a silence, then John said, “Well, what about it?”

  “What about what?”

  “Just you
and me. As soon as the weather clears, we’ll go for it. We don’t need the rest of them. We’ll alpine-style it from here.”

  I considered the plan, vacillating. On the one hand, it seemed our best chance of reaching the top. I was beginning to despair, thinking if we did not give it one bold effort in the next clear spell (assuming there was another clear spell) there would be no chance of success. And with everyone descending, it seemed there was no other way to take advantage of a clear spell that—if past experience held—would probably last only three days. On the other hand, I knew it would outrage everybody, whether we made it or not.

  “It’s worth considering,” I told John. “We’d be hanging it out, though. On our own completely. Absolutely no support.”

  “It’s our only chance,” he said. “I want to climb K2.”

  On an earlier radio call, we had revealed our bold plan. As expected, the idea had been received with incredulity. Wick had observed:

  Rick and John are talking of attempting the summit themselves. What in the hell are those two thinking about? First, they reject our plan saying we need two or three others from below to come up and carry loads. Now, they go the opposite direction and think they can do it themselves.

  That morning, while John and I listened to the storm buffet our tent, the clashes in Camp I continued. Reichardt, backed by Wickwire, still advocated his spartan attempt, and he had lobbied the tentative support of two others: Craig Anderson and Diana Jagersky. The rest—principally Chris, Cherie, and Terry—contended Lou’s plan excluded carrying adequate supplies to Camp V for a second attempt, and they were adamantly opposed to it. They insisted enough supplies must be carried to Camp V for two assaults:

  “If the supplies aren’t carried to Camp Five,” they threatened, “we will quit the expedition and leave.” Whittaker resisted their idea, saying there was not enough time or strength left. Meanwhile, Roskelley and I were at Camp IV, proposing the zaniest idea of all: to ignore everyone and climb the mountain by ourselves. Clearly, the expedition was in crisis.

  At Camp IV, we turned on the radio for the midmorning call. We knew we would be talking to Rob Schaller; the radio was kept in his tent. Rob had spent most of the expedition housed in that tent. Early on the approach march he had contracted a flulike virus that kept him ill during the beginning of the climb, and only a short time after recovering he had broken a piece of cartilage inside his kneecap on the steep face below Camp II, forcing him to stay at Camp I.

  It had been bitterly frustrating. Rob was among the core of people who first dreamed of applying for a permit to climb K2 in 1972, before Jim Whittaker had joined as the group’s leader. He had suffered the defeat in 1975, and then had joined Jim, Dianne, and Wick to organize the 1978 attempt. It was heartrending to watch Rob sidelined in that tent at Camp I, knowing so many of his years were invested in the dream.

  Despite his incapacitation, however, Rob had been far from unproductive. Although no one had been seriously ill or injured, he continued as our chief physician. He had nursed Diana Jagersky to recovery from a painful gastrointestinal ailment, and since any abdominal pain could telegraph a serious ailment, it had been important, especially considering our remoteness, to quickly and accurately diagnose her problem.

  There had been another important duty: During the heated arguments Rob had played the role of the team arbitrator, either directly intervening or as go-between over the radio, mediating between factions, calming tempers, and often restoring harmony. Sitting in Camp I, he perhaps better than anyone was able to watch the progress of the expedition with the most objective understanding, and he more than anyone was able to empathize with all sides during the arguments that came so close to ending our expedition. In that role Rob was cast as one of the team members ultimately responsible for our success.

  Rob’s voice came on the air. “I’m in agreement with your desire to get to the top,” he said, in the most diplomatic of voices, “but you don’t realize why everyone had to come down. There are no supplies left up there. There are only seven food bags and ten fuel cartridges in Camp Three, and no fuel and very little food in Camp Two. Here at Camp One, we have no Base Camp supplies left, and we have only one day of upper mountain provisions in the stockpile. Several people went down to Advance Base today to bring up more supplies, but clearly we are short.”

  “That’s all the more reason we have to move fast when the weather breaks,” I replied.

  “But you can’t do it by yourselves,” Rob continued, appeasingly. “Look, there’s still a lot of people down here capable of carrying high. Things are pretty bad right now—in fact, we’re near revolt—but we’re having a meeting soon and I hope we can work things out. I admit it’s anarchy right now—everybody making their own plans and decisions. Whittaker’s going to have to do something fast. But you guys saying you’re going to climb the mountain alone doesn’t help much.”

  John and I finally capitulated, agreeing to scrap our plan, but we stressed the importance of people returning high as soon as possible to take maximum advantage of any good weather. Rob said he would call back at 5:30 to update us on the big meeting.

  “This is a crisis,” he said. “I hope this meeting pulls people together. Otherwise, I fear the worst.”

  The core of the B Team—Cherie, Chris, and Terry—and a few of those peripherally attached—Craig, Bill, and Skip—had descended that morning to Advance Base to pick up more supplies. On the way back to Camp I, they discussed their complaints and grievances: Whittaker’s supposed overall lack of leadership, his premature selection of the summit team, his exclusion of a strong second attempt from his summit plan, his ordering Bill Sumner to descend. Of all their grievances, the last was perhaps the most emotion-packed. Affable, quiet, highly regarded by most of the team members, Bill Sumner crossed between the warring factions better than anyone, and when Jim had ordered him down for not completing his carry to Camp V, it had raised the ire of many, especially those in the lower camps.

  By the time they got back to Camp I, their tempers had reached a blow-valve pressure. The group from Camp III—Lou, Wick, Jim, and Dianne—had themselves just made an arduous descent in whiteout, blizzard conditions. But despite his own exhaustion (Jim had described the descent as the hardest day he had had on the expedition to that point), Jim went out to greet the others with a big handshake and a hearty backslap when they came into the camp with their loads. “It was such a warm welcome,” Craig said later. “It was difficult to still be mad at the guy.” Jim, a politician at heart, had masterfully defused their tempers—not through calculated subterfuge, but through genuine goodwill. He announced there would be a meeting that evening in the cook tent.

  At the appointed time everyone—except John and me—gathered. The cook tent was about ten by ten feet, rising four-sided, Lawrence-of-Arabiastyle, to a pyramid roof. There was a canopied entrance, and inside, seats arranged on food boxes and sacks of atta and dahl. In one corner sputtered two large Primus stoves, heating brew water; behind them were stored the meager remaining provisions.

  Jim opened the meeting. “The first thing I want to do,” he said in a low, mild voice, “is apologize to all of you for being so heavy-handed, for acting so excessively in the past. If I’ve been unfair to some of you, I’m sorry.”

  He paused. The only sound was the sputtering of the Primus. It was nearly dark in the tent, and cold.

  “It’s been a forty-year dream of Americans to climb this mountain, and many of us in this tent have been involved in that struggle for more than five years. The history of American climbing in the Himalaya is centered around this mountain—the British had their Everest, the French their Annapurna, and the Americans have K2. I think we owe something to all the climbers who worked so hard before us to realize this dream; I think we owe it to ourselves, who have already put in so much effort, to work together with everything we have to get one of us—any one of us—to the top of this mountain. But no one or two or even four of us can do it alone. It will have
to be a team effort.”

  Another silence. Everyone was much moved, both by Jim’s appeal for unity and by his contrition, and although the discontent was too deep to be erased by apology or appeal alone, it nevertheless set a tone of conciliation for the rest of the meeting.

  In a mild, diplomatic voice Terry spelled out the B Team’s grievances:

  “I suppose the main complaints are that many of us have been treated as just load carriers—as Sherpas—for those already chosen to go to the summit, and that we’ve not been fairly considered or given an opportunity to devise a summit strategy ourselves. We feel we have as much right to go to the top of this mountain as anybody.”

  Chris added his opinion: “I think the criteria used to choose the summit team were wrong. You judged people on how much leading they did on the route, and how fast they carried loads between camps. I just don’t think that has anything to do with how well people are going to climb above twenty-six thousand feet.”

  Chris had made a valid point, a point based on his earlier experience on Everest. There, he had discovered that the Sherpas—who had been exceptionally strong load carriers at lower altitudes, stronger, in fact, than any of the sahibs—had seemed to hit a barrier at about 8000 meters (26,240 feet). Above that, both sahibs and Sherpas had been slowed to the same lethargic pace; the altitude had been so debilitating it seemed to matter less how strong a climber had been at lower altitudes than how strong his desire was to continue pushing his body up through increasingly thin air.

  Jim had also climbed Everest and knew those problems as well as Chris, but if he should not have based his summit team decision on the criteria he had chosen, what other criteria were there? The distillation of the B Team’s argument was, then, that if it could not be accurately determined at lower altitudes who would be best to go to the summit, Jim should wait until much later to choose the team, thus giving more people a chance to prove their mettle at extreme altitudes.