K2 (11 page)

That’s where my anger came from. I’d been on the mountain too long with other climbers who weren’t even my teammates, let alone my friends, and whose judgment and technique I didn’t trust. What’s more, the irritation in my diary must have been a defense: I didn’t want this needless tragedy to undermine in any way my own determination to climb K2. Had it been Scott or Charley who had died, more than likely I would have given up my attempt.

August 15 came and went with no improvement in the weather. That day, having run out of bottled oxygen, the Swedes bailed, and the third Mexican, Héctor Ponce de León, descended to console his surviving teammate. So now there were only five of us left at Camp IV: Hall & Ball, Charley, Scott, and me. We had to pass the hours resting and daydreaming. My mind was filled with anxious thoughts: How strong would I be during the final ascent after surviving here for two or three days? Would the weather finally break? Could we get up to the summit and back before nightfall, as no one this season had yet done?

My diary entry that day is a testament to uneasiness:

That line about going down and starting all over again, I now realize, was pure rationalization. All five of us knew this was going to be our last chance that summer to climb K2.

On August 16, Scott and I were up at midnight. It was still cloudy, but calm, so we decided to go for it. Breakfast was a cup of coffee apiece. Altitude deprives you of hunger, and forcing yourself to eat can stir up
waves of nausea. It’s one of the paradoxes of high-altitude climbing that even though you are burning thousands of calories each day, you simply cannot get enough back into your system to balance things out.

We had slept in our down suits, so it was just a matter of putting on boots, overboots, harnesses, mittens, hats, goggles, and headlamps. Ice that had coated the inside walls of our confining tent showered us as we tried not to elbow each other. Finally we were out the door. We strapped on our crampons and were moving by 1:30
A.M.
Charley didn’t get off for another hour, and Rob and Gary were even further behind.

I wasn’t carrying a pack, just two liter bottles filled with a powdered energy drink; in my chest pockets I’d stuck a couple of Power Bars. I also carried a spare pair of mittens, a camera, and extra headlamp batteries. Scott and I were roped together with our fifty-foot line, in anticipation of the crevasses that we knew lay above.

The slope gradually steepened as we headed up into the mouth of the Bottleneck. We kicked steps in the firm snow, inclined at a 45-degree angle. Following in our tracks, Charley caught up to us in the Bottleneck. During the whole expedition so far, Scott and I had scarcely climbed with Charley, but in that instant he became our partner. We managed to tie in all three of us on that fifty-foot rope, which was almost absurd, yet roping up together gave us a certain feeling of security.

Near the top of the Bottleneck, the snow conditions worsened, alternating deep, soft powder with a scary breakable crust. We swapped leads often.

We’d been climbing for two hours before we finally saw Rob and Gary’s headlamps as they left Camp IV. Despite that late start, and despite using supplemental oxygen, they were moving very slowly. Was something wrong?

At the top of the Bottleneck, we began the leftward traverse, the crux of the whole route. Vlad had fixed a 150-foot rope here on August 1, and it was still in place—the single fixed rope on the mountain above Camp IV. It was anchored, with a pair of ice screws, only at either end, so if you came off in the middle of the traverse, you’d take a horrendous
yo-yo plunge before the stretchy nylon rope would catch you—assuming that neither of the anchors pulled. All the same, we clipped in to the rope and used it like a handrail, counting on what climbers jokingly call “psychological” protection.

The traverse was sketchy. The points of our crampons barely gained purchase on the downward-sloping slabs of rock that lay just beneath the sugary snow. Falling was not an option, but staying attached to the face took all the concentration we could muster.

By shortly after sunrise, we were past the traverse and had started up the long diagonal ramp that leads to the summit snowfield. We were still more than a thousand feet below the top, with some five or six hours of climbing ahead of us, but we knew that the ground only got easier above. Things were looking really positive.

All morning, however, a sea of clouds below us had been slowly but steadily rising. At 7:00
A.M.,
the sea engulfed us. It was still completely calm, and eerily warm—so warm that I took off my hat. But then it started to snow; the big, soft, fluffy flakes quickly grew so thick that I started inhaling them as I panted in the thin air. We were still roped together, because even on the summit snowfield there are crevasses you could fall into. We continued to swap leads as we plowed through the breakable crust.

As we trudged slowly upward in silence, I started calculating. Five hours to the summit, three back down to here—what are conditions going to be like eight hours from now if it keeps snowing? It was then that the knot started to form in my gut. As I later wrote in my diary, I was wondering, “What to do? The prudent thing is to turn back, but we keep going. Stupid? Probably. This is the worst part of climbing big peaks. Spend tons of $ & time to get to this point & you’re faced with this decision.”

Scott and Charley obviously weren’t going through the same kind of agonizing appraisal. When I finally stopped them and asked, “Hey, what do you guys think?,” Scott answered, “Whaddya mean?” and Charlie seconded him: “We’re going up!”

So I kept heading upward, putting off my decision from one half hour
to the next. I thought,
Why are they comfortable with this and I’m not? Am I a sissy? Do I worry too much? Am I too conservative?
All that ambivalence, all that self-questioning just ate away at me, and the knot in my gut grew heavier.

As we got closer to the summit and the falling snow showed no signs of letting up, I knew I was making the greatest mistake of my climbing life. And yet I kept going.

During the seventeen years since K2, I’ve thought long and hard about why I didn’t turn around on August 16, 1992. There was certainly a voice in my head taunting me:
What are other people going to say if I go down while Scott and Charley make the summit?
Yet today I can honestly state that my partners’ eagerness to push ahead was not what swayed me. It was, instead, my perverse inability to make a decision. In my head at the time, a broken record was playing:
I wish I didn’t have to make this decision right now. This is the worst decision in the world
.

What happened to me in 2002 on Annapurna gave me much-needed clarity about what had gone on a decade earlier on K2. On May 14 of that year, J.-C. Lafaille and Alberto Iñurrategi completed an exposed and dangerous snow-and-ice traverse under a tower called the Roc Noir, then began climbing the steep face to regain the crest of the east ridge. Coming along a little behind the lead pair, Veikka Gustafsson and I reached the traverse at 7:30
A.M.
I started to lead across, but I realized at once that the slope was loaded with snow ready to slide. All it might take to trigger a fatal avalanche was somebody kicking steps in the unstable surface.

J.-C., the most talented climber I had ever paired up with, had led the traverse, but I balked. He kept yelling down to us how dangerous the conditions were—a fact that was already obvious to me. Torn by conflicting impulses, I remembered being in a similar predicament in 1992. This time a voice in my head warned me,
Ed, don’t do now what you did on K2
. I turned back, and without hesitation Veikka turned back with me. J.-C. and Alberto pushed on to the summit, but they had a true epic getting down. It was only after they had reversed the traverse under the
Roc Noir that they, as J.-C. would later write, “once more entered the land of the living.”

That was the only time on my thirty expeditions to 8,000ers that I ever turned back while a partner went on. But I’ve never second-guessed my decision. The sense that I’d made the right choice helped me congratulate J.-C. and Alberto on their triumph with unalloyed joy and admiration. I believed they had just pulled off one of the most daring ascents in recent mountaineering history. By 2002, I was comfortable with the notion that someone like J.-C. might tread a thinner line of acceptable risk than I would.

On August 16, 1992, Scott, Charley, and I broke free of the clouds just short of the summit. We saw it shining in the sun ahead of us. At noon, we stood on top, hugging each other and gasping in the thin air. My elation was genuine, but it was tempered by a mounting anxiety as I stared at the boiling black clouds below us. After only thirty minutes on top, we headed down.

Almost immediately we plunged back into that sea of clouds, which was now darker and more ominous than ever. Soon we were stumbling downward in a thick whiteout. It was then that Scott, in the lead, started to head off in the wrong direction, toward the top of the unknown east face. On the way up, I’d memorized even the subtlest landmarks, and now I was able to shout, “No, no, no! Wrong way, Scott! Farther to the right!”

By the time we got to the ramp that led down to the Bottleneck, the snow conditions were appalling. Most of the drifts were thigh-deep, and as I broke trail, I kept knocking loose huge slabs that thundered out of sight into the void below. By now, I was convinced that we were going to die. I kept telling myself that I’d probably just made the last and most stupid mistake of my life. That realization brought with it a weird sense of calm:
Well, you might as well give it your best effort. You’ve got nothing to lose now
.

At last we reached the near end of the crux traverse. There was no hope of reversing the pitch in the footsteps we had kicked on the way
up—they were lost under layers of deep new snow. Instead, one by one we rappelled the fixed rope until we reached its sagging midpoint, then jumared back up to the farther anchor. From there, at the top of the Bottleneck, we faced in and started to kick steps downward. We were un-roped, since we knew that if one guy fell here, the rope would also pull the other two off.

Miraculously, none of the snow slabs broke loose beneath our feet. We downclimbed slowly, until at last the angle gentled out where the summit pyramid meets the Shoulder. By now, the whiteout was so thick, we couldn’t see Camp IV. So we spread out, three abreast, and clomped on down, like searchers looking for clues in a crime scene in the forest. When we got to the top of the Shoulder, we started calling out, hoping Rob and Gary could guide us into camp. At last they heard us and shouted back.

We reached the tents at 5:00
P.M.
We’d been climbing for almost sixteen hours.

I sat down in the snow outside our bivy tent. At that moment, I felt no happiness whatsoever at having climbed K2. Instead, I felt only anger at myself. That very evening, I wrote in my diary, “We’d pushed our luck beyond the max. I hope I never do that again! No summit is worth dying for. You can always come back.”

K2 was not done messing with us. As we’d reached Camp IV, I’d asked Rob, “What happened to you guys?”

A stricken look had crossed his face. “Gary’s pretty sick,” he’d said softly.

That morning, Rob and Gary had barely gotten started when Gary collapsed with severe breathing problems. It was all Rob could do to get his partner back to camp. Throughout the day, as he lay in the tent, Gary’s condition steadily worsened. Eventually we would conclude that he had a bad case of pulmonary edema.

Exhausted though we were, Scott, Charley, and I would now have to get a nearly helpless climber down the mountain. It would have been tempting to take a rest day on August 17, but I knew better. I wrote in my diary, “We gotta get outta here. Don’t want to get trapped here & die like all those people in ’86…. This mountain is gonna kick our ass all the way down.”

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.