K2 Read online

  In terms of avalanche danger, the conditions were still terrible. Knowing there might not be any tents still standing at the camps below, I packed our bivy tent, and we carried our sleeping bags with us. Tired as we were from our summit climb the day before, plowing through waist-deep snow exhausted us even further. Adrenaline was our fuel, and saving Gary’s life was our motivation. Once we’d left the Shoulder, we improvised a descending technique born of desperation. I would try to kick a solid stance in the snow, then belay Charley down on our fifty-foot rope. Then the other three would use the rope like a static hand line, with me as the anchor. Finally, when everybody was down, I’d face in and descend without a belay. All the while, Gary seemed only half-conscious.

  Needless to say, this was incredibly slow and tedious. After a while, however, we found the uppermost willow wand. Now, when I belayed Charley, he would sweep back and forth at the end of the rope until he found the next wand. It was here that those humble green garden stakes saved our lives. By 1:00 P.M., we had reached Camp III. We wanted to push on down to Camp II, and since there were fixed ropes all the way from III to II, Scott, Charley, and I decided to go ahead, break trail, and prepare camp for Rob and Gary.

  Rappelling the fixed lines was a lot easier and safer than downclimbing the steep slopes above Camp III. The three of us got to Camp II at 5:00 P.M.; Gary and Rob arrived three hours later. Weakened by his illness, Gary had abandoned his pack, containing all his gear, somewhere above, so Scott and I gave him one of our sleeping bags (we had left a second bag at Camp II). Once again the two of us cuddled underneath a single sleeping bag in a half-collapsed tent. It was a miserable night, but knowing we were slowly descending into richer air gave us strength and hope.

  Each day after we’d summited, the weather got worse and worse. This mountain just did not want to let us go. It was almost as if we now had to pay some sort of toll for having stood on her summit. Had we not had to help Gary get down the mountain, we could have moved fast, but now we were confronted with a moral responsibility that none of us could ignore. We would all go down together.

  By the next morning, Gary was in really bad shape. Only marginally aware of what was going on, he pleaded with us to leave him there to die. Scott yelled at him, “We’re not leaving you! Get your shit together!”

  It took six hours on August 18 to get Gary down to Camp I, even though we now had him breathing supplemental oxygen. He was so weak that we had to unclip and reclip his figure-eight device from each fixed rope. The snow and wind pummeled us relentlessly. At Camp I, Gary completely collapsed. I quickly erected the bivy tent Scott and I had spent our nights in at Camp IV, then sat inside it as I cradled Gary in my lap and monitored his symptoms. His breathing was rapid and shallow, and he was coughing up blood and green phlegm, some of which splattered onto the tent walls. “He looks 90 years old and ready to die,” I wrote in my diary.

  Blessedly, Jonathan Pratt and Dan Mazur had climbed up to Camp I to help out. They administered fresh oxygen to Gary, but it didn’t do much good. He could no longer stand, let alone climb down under his own steam. Eventually the Swedes arrived to lend a hand. Spurred on by the fear of losing Gary, we pushed through the night, wearing headlamps as we lowered and slid our completely helpless partner down the slopes below Camp I. We reached advance base camp, at the foot of the Abruzzi Ridge, only at midnight. From there the Swedes and Mexicans took over, while Scott, Charley, and I stumbled on down to base camp, arriving at 3:00 A.M. We had been on the move for twenty hours straight.

  The next day, a helicopter picked up Rob and Gary and flew them to Islamabad. Gary slowly recovered, first in a Pakistani hospital, then back home in New Zealand. He had survived K2 by the skin of his teeth.

  I don’t think I’ve ever been more physically or emotionally exhausted in my life than after that climb and descent. But finally I could relax and begin to savor the joy of accomplishment. “What an epic!” I wrote in my diary on August 19. “But we’re done! Alive! Summited! No frostbite! Saved 2 people!” Beneath those triumphant boasts, however, I was still haunted by our summit day. You made a big mistake up there, I thought. You happened to get away with it.

  During those reflective moments at base camp, I made a solemn vow to myself—one that, I’m happy to say, I stuck to throughout the following thirteen years of going after 8,000ers. The vow: Your instincts are telling you something. Trust them and listen to them.

  Before K2, although we had never climbed together, Scott and I thought we might have found the perfect partnership. We were already planning an expedition for the summer of 1993 that might have been even more ambitious than K2: a two-man, alpine-style assault on the huge Diamir Face of Nanga Parbat.

  Despite all the setbacks and animosities, Scott and I got along great on K2. In all the pages of my diary, though I tended to let fly at other climbers on the mountain who weren’t doing their jobs, there’s scarcely a harsh word about Scott.

  Yet Scott and I never climbed together again. And that was my decision. We simply had different styles. Scott was a freewheeling, let-it-happen kind of guy. I was more calculating. Ours, I realized, was not an equal partnership in terms of planning, decision making, and bearing the burden of stress. And although we had gotten along well, I could see that Scott and I had different levels of risk we were willing to take.

  So when Nanga Parbat came up again, I made some kind of excuse. And I politely declined other invitations from Scott in the following years. We stayed great friends, but we never again shared a rope.

  I don’t really regret that choice. But it makes what happened in 1996 all the more poignant. That spring, Scott and I were on the south side of Everest, on different teams: I was part of David Breashears’s IMAX project, while Scott was leading his Mountain Madness clients up the standard route on the world’s highest mountain.

  It was great to see my old buddy again. At base camp, we spent some happy hours just shooting the breeze and reliving K2. Some evenings he would wander over to my tent with a couple of bottles of beer, and we would sit outside chatting. Scott seemed to need someone who wasn’t on his team to talk to about their interpersonal dynamics. This was the first time he was guiding a group of clients on Everest. For the future of his Mountain Madness business, it was a huge event. A successful climb in 1996 would boost sign-ups for the following years.

  By early May, Scott had decided to join forces with Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants team for their summit attempt. This would mean a relatively large group working its way along the serpentine southeast ridge toward the summit. Scott and Rob announced May 10 as their summit day. Not wanting to be part of this large assault team, our IMAX crew chose to bide our time: we wanted the mountain to ourselves when we tried to shoot our big-screen movie. Scott and I crossed paths on the Lhotse Face as he headed up to the South Col. I gave him a big hug and said, “Have a great trip. Be safe.”

  That whole spring, something wasn’t right with Scott. He was sick much of the time, and uncharacteristically weak. He probably should have let his other guides take the clients to the top, but Scott was so used to being big and strong that it never occurred to him not to summit himself. And he had famously nicknamed the South Col route the “Yellow Brick Road,” since he thought he had its ascent down pat.

  On May 10, Scott was dragging when he got to the summit, the last member of his team to top out. On the descent, he collapsed at 27,300 feet. We think now that he was probably suffering from cerebral edema. Despite the strenuous efforts of others to save him, Scott died there, curled up on his icy ledge.

  Twelve days later, when our IMAX team went to the summit, I knew that I would have to pass Scott’s body above the South Col. And I knew that it would be an emotionally wrenching task. So I saved my last “visit” for the way down.

  In midafternoon, I sat down next to Scott’s body. His upper torso and head had been covered by a pack, but he lay on his back with a flexed knee sticking up into the air. Scott’s wife had wanted me to try to ret
rieve the wedding ring that he carried on a cord around his neck, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  Instead, I sat there in silence for long minutes. I looked at his surroundings, then back at the body of my friend. “Hey, Scott,” I said, “how you doing?” The only answer was the droning of the wind.

  “What happened, man?”

  In 2003, I climbed Broad Peak with J.-C. Lafaille. As we sat basking on top, we stared at the beautiful pyramid of K2, six miles to the northwest. Just two years earlier, J.-C. had had his own epic on K2. His intention was to make a rapid solo ascent of the Cesen route, the western variant of the Abruzzi Ridge. But the conditions were hideous. As J.-C. later explained, “The snow had a bizarre, almost dusty consistency. Above 22,000 feet, you had the feeling of swimming in polystyrene, or in polenta.”

  Instead of soloing the route, J.-C. teamed up with the great Tyrolean climber Hans Kammerlander, a longtime partner of Reinhold Messner, who had also been eyeing a solo ascent. The two superalpinists left base camp on July 20. Only two days later, at 2:30 in the afternoon, they embraced on the summit. But the descent became a nightmare. Like me in 1992, J.-C. was all but certain that an avalanche would sweep Kammerlander and himself off the mountain. That same day, a Korean climber fell to his death from the Abruzzi Ridge.

  Now, on top of Broad Peak, as we stared at K2, I said to J.-C., “Boy, I’m glad I don’t have to climb that again!” A thin-lipped smile seized his face. “Oui,” he answered, “moi aussi.” Then, remembering my ignorance of French, he added, “Yes. Me too, I am very happy not to do it again!”

  3

  BREAKTHROUGH

  People always wonder how K2 got its name. The answer is, in one sense, completely mundane, but in another, it’s an object lesson in just how hard it is to find an appropriate name for a great geographical feature. Rising from the middle of the Karakoram Range, K2 is guarded on all sides by other towering mountains and by major glaciers. It is much harder to see from the lowlands than Mount Everest is.

  It was the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, that indefatigable and classically British mapping project, that “discovered” both Everest and K2. The Everest story is fairly well known. In 1849 three surveyors trained a theodolite on a far distant summit peeking over ridgelines in front of it. They jotted down their data, then soullessly named the summit Peak XV. It was not until three years later that a Bengali “computer”—a clerk whose job it was to work out calculations—came rushing into the office of India’s surveyor general to announce that he had “discovered the highest mountain in the world.”

  Carrying the survey through hundreds of stations all the way from the seacoast, the computer, Radhanath Sikdar, had deduced an altitude of 29,002 feet. This was an amazingly accurate measurement: today, the mountain’s official altitude is 29,035 feet above sea level. It took another thirteen years, however, for the surveyor general to discard the name Peak XV and replace it with Mount Everest, commemorating his predecessor, Sir George Everest.

  In 1856, another plucky field-worker for the Great Trigonometrical Survey, Lieutenant T. G. Montgomerie, dragged his heavy theodolite to an altitude of 16,000 feet on a mountain overlooking Srinagar, in Kashmir. From that lofty vantage point, Montgomerie gazed at the Karakoram, 130 miles to the north. Taking fixes on the two most prominent summits, he labeled them K1 and K2 (K was short for Karakoram). K1 is known today as Masherbrum, a handsome 25,660-foot mountain first climbed by Americans in 1960. Two years after Montgomerie took his readings, the altitude of K2 was calculated to be 28,287 feet—also an astoundingly accurate measurement, only 36 feet in excess of its official altitude today. Several other peaks labeled in the K series still retain their original names, including the beautiful and formidable 22,744-foot tower K7.

  I’m so used to calling the world’s highest mountain Everest that it’s hard for me to stop and think whether it’s a good name or not. Everest has been the official name for so long that it just seems to fit. But long before the British surveyed it, the great peak was known to Tibetan natives as Chomolungma. (That name first appears in print on a 1733 French map of Tibet, drawn after a group of monks returned from a quarter century of work in Lhasa to report their findings.) It’s a great name, full of the reverence Tibetans feel for the mountain: it translates to “Goddess Mother of the World.” There have been efforts over the years to change the official name, or simply to use Chomolungma unofficially rather than Everest, in the same way that climbers now universally refer to Mount McKinley as Denali, even though McKinley is still the official name. But that revisionism hasn’t taken hold on Everest. Only the Chinese regularly call the mountain Chomolungma.

  After the survey discovered the great height of K2, there was a sincere effort to find a native name for the mountain. Montgomerie himself wrote, “Every endeavour will be made to find a local name if it has one.” Somebody learned that the Balti people living south of the Karakoram called K2 Chogori. The problem is, Chogori means simply “Great Mountain.” As K2 historian Jim Curran sardonically puts it, “Chogori … is likely to have been the sort of bemused answer given to the question ‘What’s that called?’”

  Instead, through the rest of the nineteenth century a number of names honoring British pooh-bahs were tried out. None of them came close to sticking, except Mount Godwin Austen, the name honoring another tireless worker for the Great Trigonometrical Survey, Lieutenant Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen, who was one of the first Westerners to explore the Baltoro Glacier. Thank God that name never won the day! (The branch of the Baltoro that sweeps under the Abruzzi Ridge, however, is officially named the Godwin Austen Glacier.)

  The fact is, K2 turns out to be a memorable name. There is no better defense of it than the one mounted by Fosco Maraini, whose 1959 chronicle of the first ascent of Gasherbrum IV, Karakoram, is one of the best expedition books ever written. Maraini argued,

  K2 may owe its origin to chance, but it is a name in itself, and one of striking originality. Sibylline, magical, with a slight touch of fantasy. A short name but one that is pure and peremptory, so charged with evocation that it threatens to break through its bleak syllabic bonds. And at the same time a name instinct with mystery and suggestion: a name that scraps race, religion, history and past. No country claims it, no latitudes and longitudes and geography, no dictionary words. No, just the bare bones of a name, all rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no attempt to sound human. It is atoms and stars.

  Remote from civilization though K2 is, the first attempt to climb it came as early as 1902. That’s nineteen years before the first attempt on Everest. The main reason for this discrepancy is that throughout the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, both Tibet and Nepal were virtually closed to foreigners, whereas K2 lay in what was then British India.

  The 1902 expedition was the joint brainchild of Oscar Eckenstein, a superb German climber who had immigrated to Britain, and Aleister Crowley, one of the strangest men ever to become a mountaineer. Crowley would later grow famous as “the Beast 666”—his own nickname for his identification of himself with the devil. He was a magician, a drug cultist, an advocate of complete sexual freedom, a poet, an egomaniac—and a climber. In the early 1970s, his autobiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, first published in 1929, became a hippie cult classic.

  Crowley unabashedly referred to himself as the best rock climber in Britain. In reality, he wasn’t even in the same league as George Leigh Mallory and several other contemporaries. But Crowley and Eckenstein’s assault on K2 was conceived as a wildly audacious project. Before they left England, the two men signed a memorandum of agreement in which they pledged “that they should together climb a mountain higher than any previously ascended by man.”

  The team was rounded out with a twenty-two-year-old Englishman, a former Swiss ex-army doctor, and two Austrians. In his Confessions, Crowley is downright withering about these four companions. The Englishman “knew practically nothing of mountains, but he had common
sense enough to do what Eckenstein told him;” the Swiss “knew as little of mountains as he did of medicine.” But Crowley’s contempt rises to a fever pitch when he writes about the Austrians, Pfannl and Wessely. Pfannl was “reputed the best rock climber in Austria,” but during the expedition, he “went actually mad,” while Wessely “brooded on food to the point of stealing it.” In retrospect, Crowley decided, “we should have done better to take none of the foreigners.” (Needless to say, Crowley’s memoir is a startling exception to the traditional narrative convention of keeping all the expedition’s dirty laundry out of sight.)

  With the team only in Askole, the last village before the Baltoro Glacier, Pfannl and Wessely (if Crowley can be believed) asked their leaders if they could put three days’ provisions in their rucksacks and go off and climb K2! Even today, Askole is a good six-or seven-day march away from base camp. In Confessions, Crowley ridicules the näiveté of the Austrians: “It is really astonishing that so many days of travel had taught them nothing about the scale of the mountains.”

  Yet the Austrians’ mistake was one commonly made by Europeans during the early attempts on the great peaks of the Himalaya and the Karakoram. In 1895, A. F. Mummery, the finest British climber of his generation, organized the first expedition to Nanga Parbat. Mummery had put up many bold routes in the Alps and Caucasus, but he didn’t seem to recognize that Nanga Parbat was of a different order of magnitude from, say, the Matterhorn. He set off to reconnoiter the lower slopes of the mountain so casually that he took with him only two porters, rather than any British teammates. None of the three men was ever seen again.