K2 (19 page)

THE GREAT MYSTERY

The deepest mystery in K2 history is what happened on the 1939 expedition. All the other major campaigns on the mountain produced not only “official” books but articles and chapters in memoirs by the principal climbers. From the 1939 expedition, the only English-language publications to see the light of day were a dutiful and unilluminating article published in 1940 in
The American Alpine Journal
and a more illuminating (but still brief) account by the leader of the expedition that appeared seventeen years later in
Appalachia
, the journal of the Appalachian Mountain Club.

Yet no K2 expedition—not even the vexed first ascent in 1954—ever provoked a storm of controversy comparable to the one that engulfed the 1939 climbers on their return home. As Galen Rowell writes in
In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods
, his personal account of a star-crossed American attempt on K2’s northwest ridge in
1975, the 1939 expedition produced “the most bizarre tragedy in the history of Himalayan mountaineering.”

As is seldom true in climbing, the controversy was deeply enmeshed in the politics of the day. And the troubles that would afflict the 1939 team were set in motion even before the members left the United States, as Fritz Wiessner assumed leadership of the party.

In the winter of 1937–38 (as mentioned in the previous chapter), while he tried to assemble his K2 team, Charlie Houston suspected that Wiessner had deliberately put off his own expedition until the summer of 1939, in hopes that Houston’s party might pave his way with a thorough reconnaissance of the mountain. Whether or not Wiessner’s motives were so Machiavellian, that was exactly what happened, for in reaching 26,000 feet on the Abruzzi Ridge, Houston and his partners had demonstrated that K2 would best be climbed by that route.

Houston’s irritation was ratcheted up a notch when he began to suspect that Wiessner had already exacted pledges for the 1939 expedition from some of the best American climbers. In a letter to Bob Bates, Houston fumed,

In the end, of course, House joined the 1938 team, which, ironically, meant that Wiessner’s friend and partner from the first ascent of Mount Waddington was not available for K2 in 1939.

The tragedy that would unfold that summer had everything to do with the makeup of the party. Besides Bill House, Wiessner hoped that Paul Petzoldt would be able to return to K2, but the fatal accident in India involving Petzoldt made that impossible. Through the winter of 1938–39, Wiessner doggedly lined up potential teammates. At one
point, four very strong climbers were on board. Bestor Robinson had met Wiessner at the foot of Waddington, as part of a team of strong California rock climbers who had their own designs on the mountain. Wiessner had magnanimously given the Californians the first crack at Waddington. He and Bill House had made the first ascent only after Robinson’s crew turned back 600 feet below the summit. Back on the glacier after their defeat, Robinson hiked over to Wiessner’s camp and said, “It’s all yours. We’re just not ready for it.” In the process, the two men became friends.

Al Lindley, a Yale graduate from Minnesota, had made the second ascent of Mount McKinley in 1932; he was also an expert ski mountaineer. Sterling Hendricks had perfected the art of lightweight assaults on remote and little-known mountains, particularly in western Canada. Roger Whitney, yet another Yalie, had learned to climb in the Alps, and had made first ascents in Alaska, Canada, and the Tetons.

On paper, then, Wiessner’s party boasted plenty of skill and experience. At various times through the spring of 1939, however, all four of those strong teammates backed out of the expedition. Some of Wiessner’s critics later tried to see those defections as rooted in a distrust of Wiessner’s leadership, but I don’t buy it. In those days, nobody could make a living from mountain climbing. All those guys had jobs they couldn’t sacrifice: Whitney was a physician, Hendricks a biochemist, and Lindley and Robinson were lawyers. Then, as now, an expedition to K2 was an expensive undertaking. Climbers often back out of such trips after they’ve made a tentative commitment to them. Look at our own K2 team in 1992: Scott went from having so many teammates lined up—that he had to put me on the waiting list—to heading off to Pakistan with only me as a partner.

In the end, Wiessner had to scrounge among casual friends he had met climbing or skiing. And he was swayed to include relatively inexperienced candidates whose deep pockets could help pay the cost of the expedition. The pivotal figure in this roster was Dudley Wolfe, a near millionaire from Boston. After graduating from Harvard, Wolfe had become
an expert in long-distance sailing races, as well as a competent skier. But he had taken up climbing only in 1936. By 1939, he was overweight and forty-four years old. According to Andrew Kauffman and William Putnam, the authors of
K2: The 1939 Tragedy
—published in 1992, it remains the only book-length chronicle of the expedition—Wolfe “required more than one guide [in the Alps] to haul his large bulk to the summits…. He was not accustomed to making decisions in the mountains and could move over difficult terrain only with the guidance and help of others.” Wolfe’s funding may have been the chief reason why Wiessner invited him to K2, but on the mountain, against all odds, he would perform better than all the other Americans (except, of course, Wiessner himself).

Forty-two-year-old Eaton (“Tony”) Cromwell was also a blueblood with access to money. Like Wolfe, he had climbed mostly with guides. As Kauffman and Putnam sardonically put it, Cromwell’s “main climbing qualifications for candidacy on the 1939 expedition consisted of the longest, but not most distinguished, list of mountain ascents of any member of the American Alpine Club; and there is some reason to believe that no one ever attempted to surpass this record, much less to boast of it.” Cromwell, in other words, was what we climbers dismissively call a “peak bagger.”

In the 1930s, forty-four and forty-two were pretty advanced ages for climbers attempting K2. But Wiessner, at thirty-nine, was at the top of his alpine game, and that summer he was, by his own report, in the best shape of his life. He had reached 23,000 feet on Nanga Parbat in 1932, and his record of technical first ascents in Europe and the United States was unmatched by any other American.

The party was rounded out by two Dartmouth students. Chappell Cranmer had shared part of a single season with Wiessner in the Canadian Rockies, but the bulk of his experience consisted of weekends on New England crags and slogs up easy peaks in Colorado. His classmate George Sheldon was even less experienced, with only two seasons in the Tetons under his belt, during which he seconded routes led by
more accomplished climbers. Both Dartmouth boys were only twenty years old.

As the team sailed for Europe in March, it must have been obvious to Wiessner that he was the leader of perhaps the weakest team to that date ever to attempt an 8,000er—much less the formidable K2. Executives of the American Alpine Club, which officially sponsored the expedition, were so apprehensive that at the last minute they recruited a sixth man, Jack Durrance. A twenty-six-year-old Dartmouth medical student, Durrance had become a first-rate rock climber in the Bavarian Alps after his family had moved to Munich. Back in the States, he worked three summers as a guide in the Tetons, where he compiled a record of first ascents in that spiky range that was second only to Petzoldt’s. His finest climb was the first ascent of the north face of Grand Teton—with Petzoldt and Petzoldt’s brother, Eldon. On that daunting route, Durrance led the hardest pitches.

Durrance should have been a powerful addition to the party, but for strange reasons, it would not work out that way. He caught up with his teammates in Genoa, where they all boarded a steamship for India. And from that moment on, things started to go wrong.

Wiessner had not been notified of the addition of Durrance to the party. In Genoa, he was expecting to meet Bestor Robinson, who had backed out only after the other five climbers had sailed for Europe. Greeting Durrance, Wiessner could not suppress his shock and dismay, and Durrance was badly hurt by his leader’s reaction. In his diary, Durrance wrote a few weeks later, “Can’t quite forget Fritz’s look of disappointment at finding insignificant Jack filling Bestor Robinson’s boots.”

On all thirty of my expeditions to 8,000ers, I don’t think I ever joined a party as weak as that 1939 team. There were plenty of feeble performers among the Americans in 1992 on K2, as I kept complaining to my diary, but we also had enough strong guys—particularly Scott, Charley Mace, and Neal Beidleman—to put together a decent summit effort. In 1939, Wiessner was the only member of the team who had ever previously been on a mountain in the great ranges, whether in Alaska, the
Andes, the Himalaya, or the Karakoram. It’s hard for me to say, particularly given the half-century gap between Wiessner’s era and mine, but I think that if I had found myself part of a party with as little collective experience as that one, I’d have backed out. And if I’d been the leader, I might have called off the whole endeavor.

Inexperienced teammates can get you in trouble on a serious mountain. John Roskelley, the best American high-altitude climber of the 1980s and my teammate on Kangchenjunga in 1989, had an ironclad principle that he would never jumar up a fixed rope that had been anchored by someone else. He didn’t trust any teammate to fix those anchors the way he trusted himself. (I’m not so adamant about this myself, but I respect Roskelley’s stubborn self-reliance.)

Inexperience among the teammates on the 1939 expedition would contribute directly to the tragedy. But there’s no evidence that Wiessner ever thought of calling off the show. For one thing, he had an ace up his sleeve: he had recruited nine Sherpa in advance. Five of them were returning from Houston’s expedition of the previous year: Pasang Kikuli, Phinsoo, and Tse Tendrup, who had all carried loads high on the Abruzzi; Pemba Kitar, who had performed the extraordinary errand of dashing down to Askole to recruit porters to carry firewood up to base camp; and Sonam. Rounding out the Sherpa contingent were Pasang Lama, who would play a pivotal role on the ‘39 expedition, Tsering, Dawa Thondup, and Pasang Kitar.

If the American team was weak, the nine Sherpa amounted to as strong a cast as had ever signed on for an expedition to an 8,000er. It is no exaggeration to say that in 1939, Pasang Kikuli was the most experienced high-altitude climber in the world, with six previous expeditions to 8,000ers (seven if you count Nanda Devi, which is just under 8,000 meters). Kikuli had seen tragedy before, on Nanga Parbat in 1934, when eight climbers died after getting trapped in a storm high on the mountain. (That and the equally catastrophic 1937 Nanga Parbat expedition were, in the words of historian James Ramsey Ullman, “as sheer horror stories, unmatched by anything in the history of mountaineering.”)
The dead in 1934 included the team’s leader, Willi Merkl (the finest German Himalayan mountaineer of his time), two German teammates, and five Sherpa. Kikuli narrowly escaped the same fate but suffered serious frostbite. It’s a testament to what a powerful and devoted climber Kikuli was that he continued to go on so many dangerous expeditions. In 1939, he was the sirdar again, as he had been in 1938, and he became Wiessner’s “personal” Sherpa, just as he had been Houston’s the year before.

The 1939 team faced the same 360-mile hike to base camp from Srinagar that Houston’s party had performed. But before the Americans even left the Vale of Kashmir, Wiessner arranged for eight days of acclimatization, during which the members practiced skiing on the nearby hills, combined with cushy living in houseboats in that colonial paradise. It was an ideal warm-up for the expedition. Describing the outing in a letter to the AAC treasurer, Wiessner was full of enthusiasm:

On May 2, the team left Srinagar. The overland journey proceeded smoothly, as the caravan averaged fifteen miles a day. The climbers’ letters home (many of which are quoted in Kauffman and Putnam’s
K2: The 1939 Tragedy)
report continuously high spirits. The members’ sense of participating in an extended lark matched that of their predecessors the year before. On May 6, George Sheldon wrote,