K2 (15 page)

In 1938, there was no road from Rawalpindi to Skardu, and there certainly wasn’t an airplane flight. Instead, Houston’s team drove to Srinagar, then hiked all the way not only to Skardu but to Askole, crossing high foothills by the legendary trade route over the Zoji La. The Duke of the Abruzzi had made the same journey in 1909, as had Crowley and Eckenstein in 1902. The total distance from Srinagar to Askole is 320 miles, and from there to base camp is another 40. So in 1938, the climbers had to trek some 360 miles just to get to K2. It took them a month to the day.

This, I’ve always thought, is perhaps the way our modern-day expeditions differ most profoundly from the classic voyages of the first half of the twentieth century. For many climbers today, the hike in is essentially a hassle, a necessary evil in the process of coming to grips with an 8,000er. On the other hand, I like approach marches. Even though the ones we perform today are far shorter than the marathon overland journeys of the 1920s and ‘30s, those hikes give me a chance to acclimate to the wilderness and to take in the local culture. The trek to K2 from Askole—only one-sixth as long as the approach the 1938 expedition made—is wild, harsh, and dusty. There are no other villages after Askole, but the landscape is starkly beautiful.

My most memorable trek in to an 8,000er was the approach to Manaslu
in 1999. My only companions were Veikka Gustafsson, our cooksirdar, and a handful of porters. There were no teahouses or hotels, like the ones on the way in to Everest from the south; we slept in barns or camped out. The natives often welcomed us into their farmhouses to share a cooking fire and a meal. It was rustic yet relaxing, and there were no hordes of trekkers like the ones on the way in to Everest.

Granted, technical skill on steep rock and ice has risen dramatically since 1938. But those early climbers were tough in ways that we moderns aren’t. I’ve never made a continuous overland journey by foot of anything like 360 miles. My personal record is just shy of 150 miles of cross-country skiing on Baffin Island with John Stetson in 2007. True, we were each man-hauling 220-pound sleds. On that trip, though, the crosscountry journey
was
the expedition. That’s quite different from having to travel 360 miles just to get started, as the team did in 1938.

What’s maybe even more impressive is that the ‘38 climbers seemed to treat the overland trek not as an unavoidable chore but, rather, as a voyage full of both tribulations and delights in its own right. In just getting to the mountain, they had a rich adventure before the real adventure even began. In
Five Miles High
, Bates devotes four chapters to the trek from Srinagar to base camp, and they contain some of the most lyrical passages in the book.

At Srinagar, Houston’s team met the six Sherpa they had hired out of Darjeeling. As all-purpose high-altitude porters, the canny Sherpa had been vital to all the Everest expeditions since 1921. This was, however, the first time they were used on K2. These six had come personally recommended by the British Himalayan veteran H. W. Tilman. The most accomplished of them was Pasang Kikuli. Among his previous expeditions was Nanda Devi in 1936, when he and Houston had formed a close bond. Pasang was, in fact, the team member with by far the greatest Himalayan experience: besides Nanda Devi, he had been on four expeditions to Kangchenjunga and one to Everest.

It seems like a quaint practice today, but in the 1930s it was normal for each “sahib” to be assigned his personal Sherpa. Houston’s was
Pasang Kikuli, who was also the Sherpa sirdar, or head man. The whole relationship between Sherpa and Westerner was modeled on Victorian colonialism, particularly that of the British. Even though they often performed heroically on expeditions, the Sherpa were infallibly regarded as servants. Bates was not being particularly racist when he wrote, “Though slight of build, they are strong, willing, and above all filled with enthusiasm for mountaineering. To them an attempt on a high mountain is a pilgrimage and the white climber almost a holy man.” Bates was simply reflecting the attitude of the day.

Unfortunately, that condescension persists even in the twenty-first century. At best, Sherpa are described as simple people, childlike, superstitious, and perpetually grinning. But if something goes wrong on an expedition, the Sherpa usually get the brunt of the blame. I can’t count the number of times I’ve read articles about Himalayan ascents in which the Europeans who reached the summit are all named, and then a phrase such as “and three Sherpas” gets tacked onto the end of the sentence. Sometimes even when Sherpa die on an expedition, they go unnamed in the official accounts.

To get from Srinagar to Skardu, the team hired porters, who carried the expedition’s goods on their backs and on the backs of their ponies. In the nomenclature of the day, these hired hands were usually called “coolies.” An even greater condescension colors expedition accounts of the porters’ contributions to the march. Bates could never have imagined just how politically incorrect the following passage would sound in 2009—he simply thought he was painting an amusing scene:

In all honesty, I can’t say that I wish we had had to hike 360 miles to get to K2. But in rereading Bates’s chapters, I realize that we moderns have lost some of the richness of the full expedition experience. Today it seems that we want to race to base camp just to start our climbs, and we forget to savor the approach journey, with its valuable transition from modern society into mountain wilderness.

Just reading Bates’s evocations of the landscape makes me envious:

A standard snafu on classic expeditions is the porter strike. Without warning, in the most inconvenient spot possible, the “coolies” will throw down their packs and refuse to go a step farther, unless their wages are doubled or tripled. At this point, in the Western author’s eyes, the cheerful natives become “rogues” or “rascals.” Rare is the climber who recognizes that the porter strike is just another form of bargaining, an integral part of native culture.

Still, a porter strike can cripple an expedition. I’ve been pretty lucky, in that among all thirty of my expeditions, the worst porter strike I had to face was hiking in to Broad Peak in 1997. Several days up the Baltoro, the porters stopped and demanded higher wages. We had agreed on set wages at the start on the trip, but after a few days that didn’t seem to matter. Our only option was to call their bluff. We told the porters we would send them back unpaid, while a couple of us would return to
Askole and hire new porters. Somehow that convinced them to keep going.

The 1938 team was lucky, too, in that the only porter strike they had to deal with came quite late on the trek, midway between Skardu and Askole. On May 27, 279 miles out from Srinagar, at the tiny hill village of Yuno, the team paid off their pony men and tried to hire local “coolies.” But two “trouble makers” (Bates’s phrase) held out for a wage of four and a half rupees per man for the 44-mile carry to Askole, rather than the two rupees and eight annas (about 95 cents) the climbers were willing to pay. The disagreement almost turned into a brawl, as sixty Yuno men “yelled and surged forward.” The Sherpa seized their ice axes and brandished them as weapons, pleading, “Let us at them, sahibs. We do not like these men.”

Rather than give in to the natives’ demand, the team concocted a solution that, I think it’s safe to say, no other expedition to the Karakoram has ever resorted to. Bob Bates and Norman Streatfeild decided to
raft
back to Skardu to hire better porters than the Yuno “scoundrels.”

To get from Yuno to Skardu, the men would have to navigate twenty-eight miles of river, first through the raging rapids of the Shigar, then along the powerful current of the Indus. The craft of choice was a
zok
. It consisted of twenty-eight inflated goatskin bladders covered with a framework of slender poplar poles. The whole thing weighed only a hundred pounds. In a photograph reproduced in
Five Miles High
, the
zok
looks incredibly flimsy.

All the work was done by local boatmen, as Bates and Streatfeild sat in the middle and hung on. Bates recounts this watery adventure almost as a lark. The boatmen, he says,

Where the Shigar entered the Indus, the boatmen had to make a desperate paddle to cross the big river to the Skardu side. The current was so strong that the
zok
reached the bank two and a half miles below the town. But it had taken only seven hours to raft those twenty-eight miles. The cost of the wild ride was eight and a half rupees, or $3.15.

Bates was evidently a handy man with a raft. In 1935, at the end of an epic five-month traverse of the Saint Elias Range in subarctic Canada and Alaska, he and two teammates had run into the Alsek River, which they had hoped to ford and which they had to cross to get to civilization. Instead, the river was in spring flood, far too deep and swift to wade. Un-fazed, under Bates’s direction the trio improvised a raft out of driftwood logs, two air mattresses, and two pairs of skis, and, using another ski as a paddle, they pulled off the dangerous crossing.

Apparently for the boatmen, a ride downstream from Yuno to Skardu was all in a day’s work. After they had arrived, they took the
zok
apart and carried it in pieces back to their home village.

In Skardu, after consulting with the
tehsildar
, or local governor, Bates and Streatfeild quickly solved the porter crisis. By May 30, the whole expedition was back on the trail. The perils of the trek were not finished, however. Above the village of Hoto, the whole caravan had to cross a two-hundred-foot-deep gorge by means of what Bates called a rope bridge. “Rope,” however, was too fancy a term: the contraption was made entirely of willow twigs twisted and braided into cables. At regular intervals, the bridge was stabilized by branches jammed crossways between the two handrails.

Bates admits that the crossing of this native bridge was terrifying. It “creaked like an abused wicker chair” underfoot, and as they tiptoed gingerly along the middle cable, the climbers recalled the Balti maxim “No rope bridge should be repaired until it is broken.”

By 1992, the willow-twig bridge was long gone. In the years since Pakistan had won its independence from India, the approaches to the Karakoram had become a region of military importance, so the primitive trail the 1938 climbers had hiked was now a good paved road, and sturdy bridges crossed the gorges. Right out of Skardu, for instance, you cross a giant metal suspension bridge. In the jeep on which we’d hitched a ride, the journey was basically routine.

On June 3, 1938, Houston’s team reached Askole, by their reckoning precisely 323 miles from Srinagar. So far, the worst mishap the team had suffered was Burdsall’s bad blisters. But now a new crisis struck, as Petzoldt came down with a fever of 104 degrees. Houston, the twenty-four-year-old medical student serving as expedition doctor, could not determine the cause of the illness, which lasted for days. (It was later tentatively diagnosed as dengue fever.)

Whatever tensions might have existed between the Wyoming cowboy and the Eastern “nabobs,” they seemed to have dissolved by the time the party reached Askole. As Petzoldt’s fever raged on, the team made an excruciating decision. Houston, though the leader of the expedition, would stay in Askole to minister to his patient. The other four climbers, the six Sherpa, and the porters hired in Askole would forge ahead toward the Baltoro Glacier and base camp. If Petzoldt did not recover soon, that could mean the end of the expedition for Houston and himself. “If he dies,” Houston joked to his departing comrades, “I’ll bury him and go on to meet you. If he recovers, we’ll both try to catch up with the expedition.”

I’ve never met Charlie Houston, but I’ve admired him ever since, as a teenager, I read
K2: The Savage Mountain
. And that decision is one of the things for which I admire him most. No matter how headstrong he may have been, he was incredibly loyal to his teammates. He supported them
to the utmost on the expedition, and praised them to the skies afterward. Mountaineers—especially good ones—can be pretty coldhearted people. But Houston seems to have been full of compassion and empathy. And in a case like this, he was willing to give up a goal he had dreamed about for a year to try to nurse a teammate back to health.

So the rest of the party pushed ahead. For the first time, they marched beneath the savage pyramids of K2’s outliers, peaks that somehow seemed familiar, since they had seen them in Vittorio Sella’s magnificent photographs. At Paiju, “the last little island of vegetation,” as Bates put it, they turned a corner and saw ahead of them “the gray back of the Baltoro Glacier, looking like a huge reptile.” In 1992, we found Paiju a bit squalid, since so many other expeditions had camped and left their trash there over the years. When I passed through again in 2003, on the way to Broad Peak, I saw that some Pakistani environmental agency had built outhouses and concrete washbasins in an effort to clean the place up. Still, Paiju will always be a memorable camp for me, because it was here on our 1992 approach that Scott and I took a full rest day, during which we hiked up a wooded hill to a rocky ridge and got that stunning first view of K2.