K2 (13 page)

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.

The Europeans dimly recognized that the sheer altitude of the world’s highest peaks would present problems unknown in the Alps. But they developed some pretty wacky theories about how to deal with thin air. Norman Collie, Mummery’s teammate on Nanga Parbat and a mentor to Crowley, was convinced that “the only chance of getting up a big mountain was to rush it.” On the K2 expedition, Crowley wholeheartedly endorsed this absurd formula. “The only thing to do,” he wrote, “is to lay in a stock of energy, get rid of all your fat at the exact moment when you have a chance to climb a mountain, and jump back out of its reach, so to speak, before it can take its revenge.”

On the Baltoro, after many days, the expedition established a camp right at the base of what would come to be called the Abruzzi Ridge. Crowley recognized that spur as a plausible route, but now it was his
turn radically to underestimate the scale and difficulty of K2. After studying the slopes above him for a full day, he concluded, as he later wrote, “that while the south face, perhaps possible theoretically, meant a complicated climb with no half-way house, there should be no difficulty in walking up the snow slopes on the east-south-east to the snowy shoulder below the final rock pyramid.”

Whew! The south face, on which Reinhold Messner would later identify the fiendish but beautiful route he called the “Magic Line,” would not be climbed until 1986. And it would be another thirty-six years after Crowley camped at the base of his “east-south-east” route that the first climbers pushed the Abruzzi Ridge as far as the Shoulder, at 26,000 feet. When they did so, it was not by “walking,” but only by virtue of some of the hardest climbing yet performed at such an altitude anywhere in the world. (Crowley’s very vocabulary betrays his dependency on the Alps as reference point: “no half-way house” sounds like a lament for the absence of a good hut in the Bernese Oberland, not for the lack of a decent tent site in the Karakoram.)

The
Confessions
reads like a 1,020-page I-told-you-so. On every conceivable matter, all the experts turn out to be wrong, while Crowley is proved right. But it does seem that on K2, Crowley wanted to attack his east-south-east spur, only to be overruled by Eckenstein, who insisted on turning the team’s efforts to the long and complicated northeast ridge. During the next few days, the climbers wore themselves out simply getting to the col they named “Windy Gap.” The high point reached (by the supposedly worthless Pfannl and Wessely) was estimated at 21,000 feet. But the party made no dent in the northeast ridge, a route that would not be climbed until 1978, when my friend Jim Wickwire and his three American teammates finally solved it.

The first attempt on the Abruzzi Ridge came seven years after the Crowley-Eckenstein expedition. It was led, appropriately enough, by Luigi Amedeo di Savoia-Aosta, the Duke of the Abruzzi. Though a titled nobleman and grandson of the first king of Italy, the duke became one of the greatest explorers of his era. Before turning his attention to K2, he
had led brilliantly successful expeditions to Mount Saint Elias (at 18,008 feet the fourth-highest mountain in North America) in 1897 and to the unknown Ruwenzori Mountains of Africa in 1906, where he made the first ascents of all the highest peaks. He had also spearheaded an ambitious dogsled attempt on the north pole in 1900, which reached a farthest north of 86°34’, breaking the record of the great Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen by twenty-three miles.

The style of Abruzzi’s expeditions mixed opulence with efficiency. On Saint Elias, for instance, the party was made up of six Italian “amateurs” (gentleman climbers like the duke), four professional guides from Aosta, and ten porters hired in Seattle. To avoid the indignity of sleeping in direct contact with the ground, the amateurs brought along brass bedsteads, which the porters hauled fifty-five miles from the Pacific Coast to base camp. Yet high on the mountain, the team went light and fast. On July 31, 1897, all ten climbers reached the summit together. Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, would not be climbed for another sixteen years.

For K2, the Duke of the Abruzzi’s party included Filippo de Filippi, the expedition doctor, who would write the now classic account of the expedition, and four professional guides and three porters from Courmayeur, the Italian village nestled under Mont Blanc on the south side. Rounding out the team was Vittorio Sella, the finest mountain photographer of his day and one of the greatest ever. Laboriously exposing large-format glass plates and developing them in the field, Sella brought back portraits of previously unknown mountains so glorious they would inspire several generations of climbers. These were published in the lavish folio volumes that the duke produced after each of his expeditions.

Nowhere in the world did Sella find himself enclosed by such a dazzling panorama as when the 1909 team marched slowly east up the Baltoro Glacier. One by one, the peaks filed by on either side—Uli Biaho, the Cathedrals, the Trango Towers, Paiju Peak, Mustagh Tower, Chogolisa, Masherbrum, and Gasherbrum IV. Though they’re all lower than 8,000 meters, these technically severe mountains would demand the best
efforts of some of the world’s top climbers from the late 1950s, through the 1980s, and they continue to lure cutting-edge alpinists today.

Long before I went to K2, I’d seen Sella’s photos of those mountains. So as Scott and I hiked up the Baltoro Glacier in 1992, I experienced a feeling of déjà vu. Even so, I had my socks knocked off by the sheer majesty of those peaks. There’s no approach to a high mountain anywhere else in the world that compares. By the time I’d finished my quest for the 8,000ers, I’d hiked up the Baltoro four times, since the approach to Broad Peak, Gasherbrum I, and Gasherbrum II is the same as the trek in to K2. Yet even on my last Baltoro march in 2003, I was still struck with wonder as I passed beneath those graceful and legendary mountains.

In 1909, the duke’s party turned north at the glacier junction called Concordia. On May 27—much earlier than most later parties would attack the mountain—they pitched a base camp at the foot of the mountain’s southeast spur. To the duke, unlike Aleister Crowley, that steep and complicated arête rising almost 9,000 feet to the Shoulder looked like anything but a walk-up. So Abruzzi postponed his attempt, while the team made a quick foray toward the northeast ridge, the route attempted by the Eckenstein-Crowley party in 1902. The guides, however, knew a hopeless route when they saw one, and quickly turned back.

On May 29, the duke, five of the Courmayeur men, and a number of Balti porters started up the southeast spur. By June 1, they had managed to establish a camp at 18,250 feet, only some 800 feet above the base of the ridge. There, however, the Balti porters saw falling rocks careening down from above and refused to carry any farther. (I can sympathize with those poor guys. They’d never been on terrain like this before in their lives. And the lower slopes on the Abruzzi Ridge feel constantly threatened by falling debris. Even on easy ground, you’re always looking up to see if anything is coming your way.)

During the next two days, some of the Courmayeur men, led by the father-and-son guides Joseph and Laurent Petigax, pushed higher. On the harder passages, they left heavy hemp ropes in place—the first fixed
ropes ever strung on K2. But it became obvious to the Petigaxes that some of the pitches would be too hard for the Balti porters, even if they could be talked into giving it a go. Without porters, there was no hope of mounting a logistical pyramid toward the summit.

Discouraged, the guides turned back. At the lower camp, the duke accepted their judgment and called off the attempt. The highest point reached by the Petigaxes is uncertain, but it was probably around 21,000 feet. (Incidentally, the Italians retrieved their fixed ropes as they descended—something virtually no subsequent expeditions would ever do.)

Still, the Duke of the Abruzzi was not ready to give up on K2. Now he turned his team toward a reconnaissance of the unexplored western reaches of the mountain. Ascending the Savoia Glacier (which he named after his home stomping grounds in Italy), he tried to gain the high col from which the northwest ridge rises. After a monumental twelve-hour push of step cutting in hard ice and snow, the team reached the col, which they named Savoia Pass, at an altitude they measured at 21,870 feet. But there they found themselves cut off from the northwest ridge by a dangerously corniced crest. Once more, K2 turned the duke back. The mountain would not be climbed from this side until 1991.

The team still had several weeks’ worth of supplies stockpiled on the Baltoro. So the duke turned his attention to several lesser peaks. On Chogolisa, he and three of the Courmayeur guides reached an altitude that they measured at 24,275 feet. Faced with dangerous cornices and crevasses, they retreated only 850 feet short of the summit. Still, they had achieved a new record: nobody in the world had ever climbed so high. The record would stand for thirteen years, until the second British expedition to Everest bettered it in 1922.

The duke had perhaps been spoiled by his blithe successes on Saint Elias and the Ruwenzori. It came as a rude rebuff to him to be turned back on K2 nearly 6,400 feet below the summit. And so, once back in Italy, one of the strongest mountaineers in the world declared that he believed K2 would never be climbed.

That malediction took its toll. K2 would not be attempted again for twenty-nine years. In the meantime, seven expeditions did battle with Mount Everest, and six different men turned back (or, in Mallory and Irvine’s case, disappeared) above 28,000 feet, within a tantalizing thousand feet of the summit.

By 1938 on K2, no one had succeeded in climbing above 21,870 feet. On neither the 1902 nor the 1909 expedition had anyone really come to grips with the challenge. All the mountain’s ultimate defenses remained unknown.