“What’s up?” Diana called from the next tent.
“That son-of-a-bitch doesn’t want us to come across,” Terry called back. Diana accepted the delay with equanimity, and Skip did not mind a rest day. But the other three saw it as yet another scheme to keep them a day behind. Terry raged, saying if another day was lost the weather might deteriorate and nobody would get to the top.
Terry called John back: “Listen, you son-of-a-bitch, you’re not going to tell me or anybody where we can go or what we can do.”
At Camp IV John was also fuming. As Terry’s voice came over the air, he looked at the radio as if he might throw it all the way to Camp III. Lou and I shook our heads, anticipating another heated exchange. Next door, Wick, Craig, Dianne, and Jim lay in their tent brewing tea and cocoa, too exhausted from the previous day’s effort and a very crowded, uncomfortable night to care what was going on.
John radioed back to Camp III: “Put Diana on the radio.”
At Camp III, Diana had already left her tent and was standing near the entrance to Terry’s tent. Terry looked at her, then reluctantly handed her the radio, saying he could not talk any more to John anyway.
“Hello, John? This is Diana.”
“Good. You’re the only one down there I want to talk to. Look, explain to those people we’re not trying to keep them off the mountain—it’s just that there’s no room for them here. The others came in late last night and they’re wasted. The winds are high, and we don’t think people should cross.”
There was a pause, then John continued, “We’re trying to get people to the summit, and we don’t care who they are. But goddamn it, if they don’t want to work together, let them get the hell off the mountain.”
Terry exploded and shouted at Diana, “Get that goddamn son-of-abitch off the radio. He’s the one who shouldn’t be allowed on the mountain!”
Diana was in the middle, still standing outside Terry’s tent. She had been trying to transmit to John with Terry shouting in the background, and we had heard him in Camp IV.
“Who was that calling me a son-of-a-bitch?” John called to Diana.
“Give me that goddamn radio,” Terry ordered Diana from the other direction.
“Tell that son-of-a-bitch he’d better be careful who he calls a son-of-abitch,” John called back.
Diana turned the radio on and off to prevent Terry from hearing John’s tirade. The broadcast was also being monitored at Camp I, where Rob Schaller feared that another blowup of tempers at this late stage might be fatal to the summit effort. Newspaper correspondent Shelby Scates was taking notes furiously. And down in Base Camp, our Liaison Officer Mohammed Saleem Khan—who for weeks, with only the company of a cook boy, had manned the sideband radio linking us with Skardu—had just finished his midmorning prayers to Allah. He listened perplexedly to the heated harangues.
Chris still sat cross-legged, listening, and watching Terry bellow at Diana to give him the walkie-talkie. He did not say anything. Cherie, however, entered the debate and also demanded the radio. John persisted in transmitting insults while Diana turned the radio off and on. Finally, she interrupted John and said, “Look, shut up for a minute, will you. We’ve got a problem down here.”
Diana walked away from the tents to where the others were out of earshot; she hoped their tempers would calm.
“Look, John,” she resumed. “There are some hot tempers down here, and a few people who feel like they’re being screwed. You’ve got to calm down and hold your tongue.”
“I’ll say what I’m thinking,” John replied.
Meanwhile, back in Terry’s tent, things were hardly cooling: Terry was still boiling mad.
“I’ll show them,” he blazed. “Let’s leave this mountain right now. We’ll go down and cut all the ropes behind us, and burn all the tents. That will fix those sons-of-bitches.” His eyes bulged madly.
That finally provoked a response from Chris, who said calmly, “You can’t do that, Terry. That would be murder, or at least manslaughter. People would die.”
“Yeah,” Cherie agreed. “You’ve got to calm down.”
Terry regained composure. Diana returned to her tent and for a while there was peace. Terry was getting used to the idea of losing a day. Chris was still pensive, melting snow for tea. In the other tent, Diana, Skip, and Bill napped.
Suddenly they were jerked awake.
Whomfff!
“Avalanche!”
Skip and Diana bolted for the tent door. Bill was a second slower. Diana got her head out the door expecting to see the serac above the camp tumbling down. Instead she saw the other tent on fire. It was not an avalanche at all; a stove had blown up. Diana ran over—Terry and Cherie were throwing gear out the tent door. They put out the fire. Inside, Diana could see Chris. He had been changing cartridges on the butane stove; what he had thought was an empty canister had held residual gas, which had escaped and ignited on the other stove. His face had been directly above the explosion, and although he was uninjured, he looked a mess. His eyebrows were burnt, his mustache was partially gone, a section of beard was missing. There was the pungent smell of singed hair and a gaping hole in the tent.
“Whew, what a relief,” Diana said. “It was only the tent blowing up.”
Diana helped move the scattered gear back into the tent. When things quieted down, she noticed that Cherie was crying softly. “Chris is quitting the expedition,” Cherie said. “He’s going down.”
Diana looked at Chris, now a frightful sight with half his hair missing. She managed to get Chris aside to try to talk him out of it.
“Chris, you’re making a mistake. I know things are bad, but you’re too close to all the problems to get a clear view. You should wait a couple of days. You still are strong; you still have a chance to go to the summit. And even if you don’t get to the summit you still need to feel like you’ve done everything you can, because a couple of months from now this won’t seem like such a big deal. You’ll forget all these arguments.”
“No,” Chris replied, “my mind is made up. I’m going down.”
“You’ll regret it.”
“My mind is made up.”
All morning, while Terry and John had been arguing over the radio, Chris had been thinking through the possibilities, and they all led to the same final scene: physical violence with Roskelley. Chris had envisioned a fight, maybe even resulting in one of them pitching the other off the knife-edge ridge. Chris told himself that was not why he had come to the mountain. Somehow things had gone wrong. The only solution he saw was to withdraw quietly.
Things certainly had gone wrong. But why? Were we not mature adults who had all been on previous expeditions, who had all climbed before in the Himalaya and who were all, therefore, accustomed to working together under difficult conditions? Had we not all made a vow to work together to get any one of us to the top of this mountain, K2? With the passage of each day, those words seemed buried deeper and deeper in a halcyon past.
What was it, then? Was it that we were achievement-oriented personalities in a situation where there was only a small amount of the ultimate achievement—standing on the summit—to go around? That fact alone could have explained much of our dissension. Perhaps it was the prolonged stress from lack of oxygen, the constant exposure to danger. We had all been climbing at altitudes varying between sixteen thousand and twenty-five thousand feet for fifty-three days—almost two full months. That is long enough to strain the camaraderie of even the most affable of personalities.
Bad weather has to share some of the blame. Rob Schaller, sitting at Camp I, often with only the HAPS for company, had time and was in a position to view the expedition overall. He later said:
I think the weather was the culprit: it caused our problems. If we had had better weather, which we would have had if we could have arrived at the mountain a month earlier (remember, our itinerary had been delayed a month by the Pakistan government to avoid overlapping Bonington’s climb), we would have had super
b weather. Our crises occurred because there were only supplies for a limited number of people at higher camps. It caused people who had summit aspirations to subjugate their desires, to supply and support others who did try for the summit. The weather forced conflict because it forced people’s roles to change on the mountain.
Storms also caused physical separation of people stranded at different camps. Many of the rows had taken place over the radio; had we more often been all in the same camp at the same time, where we could have worked out our differences face to face, no doubt there would have been fewer conflicts. Feelings and opinions are easy to misinterpret over the radio.
As with most breakdowns in human relations, the struggle to communicate with one another—that is, understand and empathize with one another’s attitudes, beliefs, and opinions, with one another’s desires and goals—was at the root of our problems. It was not the physical separation alone; even when we could talk face to face, we often misunderstood one another. Had Chris, Terry, and Cherie been able to understand John’s background—if they could have looked through his eyes to when Devi had died on Nanda Devi, to when the eight Russian women had frozen to death in the Pamirs—perhaps they might also have understood why he objected so strongly to women going on expeditions. Or had John and I, on the other hand, been able to see Chris as a man facing a labyrinth of problems from a bitter divorce, a man who needed to confide in and talk with someone, we could better have understood his actions. We could have tried to learn more about Terry and Cherie. Had we known that, before the expedition, Terry and Cherie had agreed between themselves to try, whenever possible, to climb on separate ropes with different people, because that way if something happened—if there was an avalanche or an accident—chances would be better that one would survive to look after their children; had John and I known that simple, stark fact—perhaps we could better have understood Terry and Cherie.
But the fact remained: Chris had quit the expedition. I was saddened when Terry announced, over the radio that night, that Chris had descended to wait out the expedition at Base Camp. The memories came flooding back, and the guilty feeling that somehow we had not worked things out as we should have, that we had failed to understand each other. I recalled that poignant scene the day we had established Camp V, when Chris had been climbing behind us, and we had not waited for him. The rope had symbolized everything: the distance that had broken our friendship.
I wondered if we could ever repair it.
On the positive side, Terry announced that, after much soul-searching, he and Cherie were committed to offering whatever support and assistance they could to get someone to the top. At that point, the A Team was again the de facto first summit party, and it was encouraging to hear Terry’s reversal of temperament.
The wind had ceased, and the weather remained clear. That afternoon at Camp IV had been superb—windless and warm. Those who had made the previous day’s debilitating push across the traverse were recovering, and everyone at IV was eager for an early start to Camp V the next day.
We felt the summit was near; Camp V tomorrow, then Camp VI, then the summit, then home.
AUGUST 28. 4:30 a.m. No wind. No motion of nylon tent walls. Quiet darkness. Zip open the tent window: a clear, black sky; cold, cold air and starlit snow and ice; black shadows like fathomless holes—passageways to the center of the earth. A memory: the first astronauts to walk on the moon saying the surface shadows were absolutely black, with no atmosphere to scatter light, and they had stepped in shadows only with a primordial fear of falling. The summit pyramid through thin, cold, predawn atmosphere. Moonscape.
I zipped shut the tent window and lay back in my sleeping bag. John would be awakening soon and starting the stove to bring meltwater to boil for the morning’s brew. I stared at the tent wall, lit sufficiently by starlight to outline the checkerboard pattern of the rip-stop and thought, It will be a long, long day, and we need an early start. A long carry to Camp V, but our last carry. The weather looks right. In three days we will be on the summit of the second highest mountain on earth.
It was a luxury to have a few minutes to gather thoughts before starting on the morning chores. The cold predawn had a meditative quality, ideal for reflection. My mind flipped over the previous day’s events: the heated arguments with Camp III; Terry and Cherie deciding in the end to support the first summit effort; Chris quitting the expedition. I thought of the conversations we had had all that afternoon, trying to decide on a summit route, and that gave me a slightly uneasy feeling.
For several days, Lou had been suggesting that the first summit group also try the Abruzzi finish. He was not absolutely committed to that route, but he had pointed out it did offer advantages: It would be an easier and therefore a more certain access to the summit; it would probably be safer; it would be a better route of descent. He had also noted it would require no fixed ropes. The direct finish, on the other hand, had a very steep—perhaps completely vertical—section halfway up, and it would most likely be necessary to climb above Camp VI, work to fix ropes over the steepest sections, go back to Camp VI, then the following day go to the summit. That would mean an extra day—an extra day to depend on good weather holding.
John and I had been adamant, nevertheless, in our desire to finish by the direct route. In fact, we were intractably committed to it, arguing it would be the most aesthetic finish to the northeast ridge. John also argued we could do it in one push, not feeling, as Lou did, the need to fix ropes. We knew it would be difficult: the Poles had climbed all the hard sections in 1976, and from their accounts we knew what to expect. They had found it so difficult, so exhausting, they had been unable to finish the last five hundred feet to the summit, even though they had climbed above the steepest and hardest sections. Nevertheless, John and I felt we had a good chance of completing the route.
Lou and Wick had been frustrated by our recalcitrance, and the ultimate result of our debates was the uneasy decision to split the summit attempt: John and I would go it alone on the direct finish; Lou and Wick, possibly supported by Craig, would traverse to the Abruzzi Ridge. Jim, and perhaps Dianne if she was strong enough, would carry loads to support John and me on the direct finish.
We had been careful not to divulge this plan to those at Camp III, realizing it would feed their feelings of being victimized by our machinations to get to the summit. Since they themselves had planned and hoped for a dual assault using B Team personnel, to hear that we now planned a similar strategy, but with a split A Team, could only be taken by them as yet another example of our skullduggery. I had to sympathize with them, too: I would have felt the same. But at the bottom of our plan, with its element of deceit, was our belief that without Chris, the B Team simply did not have the power to make a serious summit bid. Obviously, we could not tell them that. We could not risk losing any more of the team.
I was feeling uneasy about our plan because I realized John and I would be sticking our necks out—way out. Alone on the direct finish up the summit pyramid. I closed my eyes and imagined what it would be like: at 27,500 feet, climbing up ice nearly vertical. To the right I would see the great north glacier and beyond, 18,000 feet below, the burnt hills of Shaksgam and Sinkiang. Above, blue, vertical smoothness. Would we have oxygen? If so, the bottle would be pulling on my back, pulling me off balance, and I would have to fight to hold on to the ice pick stuck in the frozen blue. My feet—only the crampon front points would be stuck in the ice, a mere half inch. If my ax popped I would fall backwards. In my imagination, I looked and saw John below, belaying the rope, and under him the wall of the pyramid sweeping down, down, thousands of feet to the Godwin-Austen Glacier. If we did not use oxygen? No oxygen, 27,500 feet, very steep, hard climbing. I would have to economize every movement, breathe as evenly as possible to avoid blackout. The glacier so far below. Could I do it? To 27,000 feet—27,500—28,250—without oxygen?
Some of the reservations I had felt weeks earlier returned. Once again I remembered how, on Everest, my lun
gs had filled with mucous at 26,000 feet. Would that happen again? Would it be more serious this time? At least I had already climbed to 25,000 feet several days before to Camp V, carrying a heavy load, and I had felt strong. Perhaps I could handle the additional three thousand feet. I knew, however, those three thousand feet would be critical: there is an enormous difference between 25,000 feet and 28,250 feet. At that latter elevation—the summit of K2—only 33 percent of the normal sea-level oxygen remains in the atmosphere.
One other fear surfaced there in the quiet predawn: bivouacking. On the direct finish, an emergency bivouac on the descent seemed almost certain. If it was a windy night, if the weather went bad, it could mean dubious chances of survival, almost certain frostbite. Was I willing to risk toes and fingers? I thought about it: the answer was yes. Weighing all things, I felt ready for the effort of my life.
I heard John roll over and fumble with the stove. I was in a good mood.
“I say, old chap, how about coffee?” I chirped.
“Shall I serve it with beef jerky, or do you care for Corn Nuts?” John answered. “We also have shrimp creole left from last night, if you prefer.”
“I’ll pass on the creole. Just ran out of Rolaids. Coffee’s fine, thank you.”
Lou was also awake. “How’s the weather?” he asked.
“Bright and clear.”
“I think we’ve got it this time. Three days to the top.”
Presently, the first light colored our tent soft yellow, and everyone was busy thawing boots over stoves and drinking as much as possible. We all knew the key to acclimatization and to minimizing the chances of hypothermia, frostbite, and pulmonary problems was maximum hydration.
All of a sudden there was a frantic movement in the next tent. Another stove explosion, quickly extinguished. Wickwire beat out flames from his beard, then tore pieces from his nylon wind shirt to patch the hole in the tent. Wick stayed behind an extra half hour to sew up the hole while the rest of us got under way with full loads; with the route already stomped down, he was able to catch up with us.
The Last Step Page 28