K2 (17 page)

Throughout this surge, in fact, three Sherpa—Pasang Kikuli, Phinsoo, and Tse Tendrup—played a crucial role, as they carried the bulk of the loads and did most of the work building up tent platforms by stacking loose rocks on sloping ledges.

On July 5, the team established Camp III at 20,700 feet. Camp IV was pitched only 800 feet higher on July 13. For the first time, hope outweighed discouragement in the climbers’ hearts.

On my own expeditions, I’ve always found that it’s during the storm days, when you lie around inside your tent and try to kill time, that the tensions among team members tend to escalate. Confined in a small space, elbow to elbow with another guy, you can find that even a good buddy gets on your nerves, let alone a teammate you’ve already found to be slightly irritating. But when you’re climbing hard, those tensions dissolve and you get along better with your partners.

From July 2 on, the 1938 team was pushing hard, with important deeds accomplished every day. And with this activity, morale soared. About one happy camp reunion, House writes, “A hot grog was served up and somewhere an excellent fig pudding was found. Later two chess games started and before we knew it Bates launched into a series of his favorite Alaskan sourdough ballads, startling even the Sherpas, who peered from their tents in awe.”

Yet the climbing inevitably produced moments of high tension and even of anger. Since
Five Miles High
adheres scrupulously to the prohibition against airing dirty laundry, those conflicts are only hinted at, in passages whose tone turns semicomic. You have to read between the lines, for instance, to decipher the real antagonism between House and Petzoldt on one dicey traverse. In House’s telling,

On July 12, an incident occurred that, thanks in large part to misunderstandings, could easily have killed one or more of the climbers. Camp III had been pitched in a very dangerous place, directly beneath a steep slope that was littered with loose rocks. That day, Bates, House, and Phinsoo had no sooner arrived at Camp III than Houston, Petzoldt, Pasang Kikuli, and Tse Tendrup started to carry loads above. As they departed, they promised that “they would be as careful as possible with the loose rock.”

The trio who had just arrived at Camp III set to work improving the tent platforms. Suddenly, from 500 feet above, the first rock fell.

The three men in the line of fire were terrified—and furious. They screamed at their comrades above. But, as House explains, “A high wind was blowing so the climbers could not hear our shouts and thought the rocks were bouncing harmlessly out to the sides.” By the time the four men in the lead had almost returned to camp, their three teammates were “wild,” unable to suppress “bitter remarks.” As they arrived, Houston, Petzoldt, and the two Sherpa found “their cheery greeting followed by a dead silence. One look at the holes in all three of the tents was enough to tell them what had happened.”

I can completely sympathize with those guys’ predicament. No one was really to blame—the true cause of the potentially fatal accident was the bad placement of Camp III. But given the logistics of the day, that placement was unavoidable. What else could Houston and Petzoldt have
done? They weren’t happy with the location of Camp III, but they had to climb. From 500 feet above, you can’t tell where the rocks you knock loose are landing. And on that kind of sketchy terrain, it’s almost impossible to avoid dislodging rocks.

But in
Five Miles High
, House gives the dispute a happy ending:

So the official expedition narrative sticks to its formula of tucking the dirty laundry out of sight. But in her 2007 biography of Houston, Bernadette McDonald published excerpts from Houston’s letters home that, when I first read them, puzzled me. “Petzoldt has turned out to be a gem,” Houston wrote early on in the expedition. The tension between the cowboy and the nabob seemed to have vanished. It was instead Bill House of whom Houston was critical. “He is continually complaining about the lack of food,” Houston wrote around June 27, “and demands much more than we are able to provide. He is a very fine climber, but his choice of routes is poor and he takes far too many chances. In addition, he has frequent depressed spells during which is very bad company.”

These strictures are all the more surprising in view of the fact that House led many of the hardest pitches all the way up the Abruzzi Ridge to just below the Shoulder, including the indisputable crux of that 8,000-foot ascent. As I mentioned earlier, the nearly vertical 80-foot rock fissure at 21,500 feet has been known ever since as House’s Chimney. On July 14, with Bates belaying, House tackled the cliff.

The team had pitched Camp IV only 75 feet below that cliff, but the ice leading up to it was so hard that it took the two men a full hour to
chop steps to reach the base of the chimney. Bates set up a belay by draping a loop of rope over a prong of rock, then passing the rope behind the prong. That technique harkened back to Victorian times, but by today’s standards it seems pretty marginal. If House had fallen off the cliff, the hemp rope might well have severed as it came tight on the sharp rock.

House’s lead was a desperate struggle, as it took him two and a half hours to surmount the 80-foot pitch. He managed to drive a good piton near the base of the crack, but 40 feet higher, as he stood on a tiny ledge and tried to place a second piton, “the metal only crumpled up after penetrating a half-inch of rock.” (The soft-iron pitons of the day, the best available, were all too liable to bend into useless spikes under a hammer blow. It would not be until the 1960s that chrome-molybdenum pitons vastly improved on the old hardware.)

To inch his way up the fissure, House got into classic chimney position, feet flat against one wall, back against the other. Abruptly, however, he realized that he had left his crampons in his pack. The metal spikes dug into his back and caught on nubbins of rock. Only by thrashing his way brutally upward could House gain ground. “I felt I was pretty close to my margin of safety,” he later wrote, “but there were no piton cracks and I thought anything would be better than climbing down without some protection from above.”

Out of sight around a corner below, shivering with cold, Bates shouted up to urge that House retreat. “It was a suggestion I certainly would have liked to follow,” House joked in retrospect. Instead, he struggled onward, at last emerging on top of the cliff.

The importance of House’s brilliant lead can hardly be overestimated. In that long band of cliff at 21,500 feet, there’s no other weakness, so no alternative to the chimney. If the climbers had not been able to get up that pitch, their attempt on the Abruzzi Ridge would have ended then and there.

In 1992, after Scott and I drew straws and I won the lead, I got up the fissure not by chimneying inside it but by stemming outside, my feet and hands spread-eagled on rock holds on either side. Unlike House, I wore
my crampons all the way up. I was able to clip in to a couple of pitons already in place—”fixed pins” left by some previous expedition. It’s almost impossible to rate pure climbing moves on a big mountain, but I’d say the chimney was only about 5.4. (The decimal scale of difficulty in use today ranges from 5.1, the easiest, to 5.15, the hardest. In the 1960s, when pitches harder than 5.9 started to be performed, climbers could think of no way to rate them except by calling them 5.10, then 5.11, and so on.)

On the other hand, I found the crack half-choked with ice and snow, into which I could kick a few footholds, which I’m sure made the pitch easier than it was for House. No matter what, as Peter Boardman remarked in 1980, House’s Chimney was far harder than anything that had been climbed on Everest by 1938.

The climbing had so worn out Bates and House that they decided to pitch Camp V only a little bit higher, a mere 500 vertical feet above Camp IV. They had reached the foot of the Black Pyramid, a steep, triangular buttress made up of mixed rock.

By now Burdsall, though he had gamely carried loads to the lower camps, had dropped out of the team pushing higher on the route. At forty-two, he was the oldest of the five American climbers and the least skilled technically. Streatfeild had already withdrawn from the advance guard, as he’d performed his fuel-searching mission to Gasherbrum I, then turned his attention to surveying unmapped parts of the surrounding peaks and glaciers.

The climbers still pushing high were reduced to Bates, House, Houston, and Petzoldt—as well as the three strongest Sherpa. Among those three, Pasang Kikuli was the stalwart, performing as well as the four Americans.

In 1992, after I’d strung a good fixed rope down House’s Chimney, it was a routine business to rappel down that pitch and jumar back up it. Not so for the guys in 1938, who, carrying twenty-five-pound loads up the chimney, had to haul themselves hand over hand as they hung on the loops they had tied in the fixed rope.

From July 15 to 20, as the weather held almost perfect, the climbers frenziedly pushed the route higher and higher. Houston and Petzoldt made some daring, exposed leads as they forced their way through the Black Pyramid. The team established a Camp VI at 23,300 feet, and then Camp VII at 24,700 feet. On the afternoon of July 19, Petzoldt and Houston broke through the 25,000-foot barrier. Only a relatively low-angle snow slope stood between them and the Shoulder.

There’s a line of Houston’s about this gutsy push that makes me chuckle: “After a restful cigarette, which seemed especially welcome at these high altitudes, we turned again to our task.” These guys, in the shape of their lives, were smoking all the way up the mountain!

That evening, with everyone ensconced in Camp VI, the team held another council of war. Bates had calculated that the men had only ten days’ worth of food and fuel left. Worried about an eventual descent in bad weather, the party decided to err on the side of caution and send only two climbers up to push the route to the highest possible altitude. Without even putting the question to a vote, the team chose Houston and Petzoldt, as Bates and House magnanimously stepped aside.

On July 20, all four men made the last carry to Camp VII. They decided that the Sherpa had “reached the limits of their climbing ability” and so should be left behind; but at the last minute Pasang Kikuli begged to be included, and the “sahibs” relented.

That evening, Petzoldt and Houston settled into their sleeping bags at Camp VII, restless and eager for the final push the next morning. Houston had already concluded that there was no hope of reaching the top; it would be achievement enough simply to scope out a route through the summit pyramid that might show the way for some future party to make the first ascent of K2. In light of subsequent events, Petzoldt apparently did not agree.

And then the pair made a dismal discovery: they had forgotten to bring matches with their loads! Without matches, there would be no way to light the stove; without the stove, no way to melt snow into water. Houston later wrote,

It took three matches to light the stove for dinner. The men melted pot after pot of snow, and even slept with a pot full of water wrapped in their clothing and placed under their feet, so that it would not freeze during the night.

In the morning, it took three more matches to light the stove to cook breakfast. The two men were off as soon as the sun’s rays struck their tent. Roped together 60 feet apart, Petzoldt and Houston slowly plodded up the snow slopes leading to the Shoulder, often plunging in to their knees. In an era before down jackets, each man wore four Shetland sweaters over his flannel shirt, with an outer windproof suit and two pairs of wool mittens, but they still felt the cold acutely.

On that last push, the Wyoming cowboy came into his own. “Petzoldt was feeling strong and moving rapidly,” Houston later admitted, “but I had a curious weakness in my legs, so that every upward step was an effort requiring several breaths.” By 1:00
P.M.,
the two men had not only topped out on the Shoulder but had traversed its easy ridge to a point only 900 feet short of the slope that leads up to the Bottleneck couloir.

The men ate a quick lunch, then unroped, hoping to dry the coiled line by laying it out in the sun. Petzoldt continued in the lead. Houston later recalled,