K2 (21 page)

But on some of the expeditions I most admire, the man officially in charge of the assault led from the front all the way. In 1950 on Annapurna, Maurice Herzog was always out in front, and in some ways he was also the strongest climber on the French team. In 1938, Charlie Houston led from the front all the way to 26,000 feet on the Abruzzi.

For that matter, David Breashears, the leader of our 1996 IMAX expedition to Everest, had a reputation for being a dictatorial leader. Some people actually said to me beforehand, “How can you work with that guy?” But David was always out front, and he worked harder than anyone
else. I knew when he hired me that he expected a lot from me. But if you did your job, you never heard any criticism from David. That’s leadership: lead by example, lead from the front, inspire people to follow your lead. That’s why, despite the difficulties of our own mission to get the IMAX camera to the top of Everest while filming ourselves, and despite getting caught up in the tragedy that unfolded that May, our expedition was a success. That’s why David’s
Everest
is still the highest-grossing IMAX film ever made.

In my opinion, a much worse situation develops when the official leader attempts to lead from the rear, watching the climbers through binoculars and ordering their movements over the radio. It’s all too easy to sit on your duff at base camp and tell people up high what they should be doing. The one time I had to put up with that sort of nonsense, I felt like radioing back to the leader, “Hey, dude, why don’t you get your ass up here and try it yourself?”

Whether or not Wiessner was overbearing and dictatorial toward his teammates, the logistical plan he came up with, although it necessitated a large number of load carries, strikes me as a brilliant one. Every camp was to be equipped with three sleeping bags and air mattresses, as well as stoves and gasoline and plenty of food. As Wiessner explained in 1984, “I believe that if you climb a mountain like this, you want to be sure, if something goes wrong or somebody gets ill, you can hold out for at least two weeks in any camp. If a man had to come down in very bad weather, he ought to be able to just fall into a tent, and everything would be there.”

The problem that developed on the 1939 expedition, starting at Camp IV, was due almost entirely, I think, to the physical weakness or psychological faintheartedness of all the “sahibs” except Wiessner and Wolfe. On June 21, Wiessner, Wolfe, Sheldon, and five Sherpa were established at Camp IV, with plenty of food and fuel. Wiessner was looking forward to leading House’s Chimney in the morning. Instead, a violent storm arrived in the night. With only a brief lull, the storm lasted through the next eight days.

At Camp II, 2,200 feet lower, Durrance guessed that the peak gusts of wind reached eighty miles an hour. At Camp IV, temperatures as low as minus 2 degrees Fahrenheit were recorded. Even Wiessner was daunted by the conditions. In a 1940 article in
The American Alpine Journal
, he would write, “To describe these days and nights of storm and cold is not within my power. They were terror-inspiring.”

It was at this point that George Sheldon seemed to have had his fill of K2. In Camp IV, he suffered frostnip of the toes. When the storm finally broke, on June 29, he descended with three Sherpa, eventually going all the way to base camp. Sheldon would make only one more load carry on the mountain. During the rest of the expedition, he and Wiessner would not see each other again.

Meanwhile, on June 30, after nine days at Camp IV, Wiessner started up House’s Chimney. The fixed ropes left by the 1938 party had frozen into the slope, and in any event, Wiessner was not willing to count on them. (Even in a single year’s worth of freezing and fraying in the wind, fixed ropes—especially the old hemp ones—become dangerously fragile. I’ve never completely trusted ropes left on 8,000ers by parties from previous years.)

So Wiessner led the pitch the same way his old partner Bill House had the year before, and it took him two hours (only half an hour less) to gain those critical 80 feet. In
The American Alpine Journal
article, he later saluted his friend’s 1938 effort: “I can only commend House for his ability in having originally led up this piece of difficult rock climbing.”

On top of the cliff, Wiessner strung a new fixed rope. Then, with the aid of strenuous hauling on the climbing rope, he got both Pasang Kikuli and Dudley Wolfe up the chimney. Wiessner was a slight man, wiry and only five feet six inches tall. Kikuli was also slight, but Wolfe was a big hulk of a fellow, and a clumsy climber to boot, so it must have taken a prodigious effort even for two men to drag him up the nearly vertical cliff. The trio pitched Camp V at 22,000 feet, reusing the platforms built up by the 1938 party. Then they waited out two more days of storm.

In this way, the team started to fragment. Down below, the Dartmouth students, Cranmer and Sheldon, of whom Wiessner had expected great things, had effectively thrown in the towel. Cromwell, whom Wiessner had appointed to the rather nominal role of deputy leader, had been intimidated from the start by the difficulty and the danger of the climbing on the Abruzzi. Now he declared that under no condition would he go above Camp IV. Only Durrance, among the American climbers below Camp V, still had any heart for the ascent. But he had been hampered all along by having to use old, lightweight boots, after a custom-made pair ordered from a Munich store had failed to arrive. When the new boots finally made their surprise appearance, carried up to base camp along with the mail by porters from Askole, Durrance was overjoyed. But thereafter, despite numerous attempts, he found it impossible to acclimatize. Even at only 20,000 feet, he would have to stop and pant desperately, crouched over with his hands on his knees. During the rest of the expedition, he would never climb higher than 600 feet above Camp VI, which was at 23,400 feet, below the Black Pyramid.

On our own K2 expedition in 1992, we had team members who seemed to lose heart for the project after they’d been on the mountain for a month. It’s all too easy to let one’s initial gung-ho enthusiasm evaporate in the face of storms and setbacks. In its place, a powerful longing to get the hell out of there and head for home takes over. That’s why I’ve always (and especially on K2) psyched myself up beforehand, to the point where I was willing to spend as long as it took on the mountain to get a chance to climb it. By June 30, the 1939 team had been at base camp or above for exactly one month. Already Sheldon, Cranmer, and Cromwell were, it seems, ready to go home, and it would not be long before Durrance was of the same mind.

So the two halves of the party began to separate—a disconnection that would have everything to do with the coming tragedy. Later, Wiessner would be severely criticized for allowing a communications gap to develop between the climbers up high and those waiting below. Some “experts” would fault him for not bringing along radios. But the 1938
team had had no radios, and it would be several years before these devices really became practical on mountains like K2.

Kauffman and Putnam admit that in 1939, intercamp radios were both exorbitantly heavy and unreliable. But they react to Wiessner’s later statement that he had chosen to do without radios “for ideological reasons” with yet another piece of armchair second-guessing: “Should ideology have been allowed to play a dominant role in a life-and-death situation, such as an assault on the world’s unclimbed, second-highest, and most formidable mountain?”

The inability or unwillingness of four of the Americans to climb high put a huge amount of pressure on the Sherpa. Not only did they take the brunt of the load hauling, but as the weeks passed, they moved between camps more and more while unaccompanied by any “sahibs.” In 1938, as much as Houston trusted Pasang Kikuli, he never let him climb solo between camps. The Sherpa were always paired with at least one of the four leading Americans. Pretty much the same routine had been the norm on all the British Everest expeditions since 1922.

In 1939, the Sherpa also became message carriers. Rather than climb up to a high camp to confer with Wiessner, Durrance, since he was unable to acclimatize, would write a note to the leader and entrust it to a Sherpa. This sometimes unreliable communication system created its own confusion.

To Wiessner, the responsibility of the climbers lower on the mountain was simple and obvious: get those camps supplied! The whole logistical pyramid depended on a chain of well-stocked camps leading all the way up the Abruzzi Ridge to the Shoulder. That makes perfect sense to me, and I know that if I’d been in Durrance or Cromwell’s shoes, I’d have done my damnedest to get those loads up the mountain. If that’s the agreed-upon plan, you stick to it. But Kauffman and Putnam, as well as other critics, fault Wiessner at this point for not giving clear orders to the troops in the rear.

What else could Wiessner have done? If he hadn’t been out front pushing the route, nobody would have done it. Sheldon and Cranmer
were out of action; Cromwell refused to go above Camp IV; Durrance could not adjust to the altitude; and Wolfe, though game and strong, didn’t have the skill or nerve to lead.

As they researched
K2: The 1939 Tragedy
, Kauffman and Putnam won the trust of Jack Durrance, who was eighty years old by the time the book was published. And they made a great breakthrough when Durrance let them read and quote from his 1939 diary—a privilege he had granted to no previous journalist. Those diary entries add a wealth of new information about the expedition, and Kauffman and Putnam’s use of them goes a long way toward exonerating Durrance from his role as the villain of the 1939 K2 saga, a view some of Wiessner’s defenders (and Wiessner himself) long held.

Yet in many ways, Durrance’s diary only deepens the mystery of what went wrong on the mountain. Its passages, which vacillate between hopefulness and despair, between enthusiasm and misery, do not neatly support any of the latter-day theories about what caused the tragedy. One thing the diary does document, however, is just how disheartened and homesick the four rearguard Americans had become even before the end of June. On June 26, Durrance wrote, “The most discussed topic is what we shall do when once again in civilization—a week’s stay in Srinagar—sightseeing in India (Taj Mahal, etc.).” As Kauffman and Putnam acknowledge, at this relatively early stage of the assault, with the scheduled return of the porters from Askole still almost a month in the future, “Eyes turned away from the hardships of K2 and toward the comforts of home.”

There’s a term some mountaineers use for this phenomenon. It’s called “crumping.” To
crump
is to let the hardship and danger of expedition life drain you of all your mountaineering ambitions, so that all you want to do is get the hell out of there. (It’s not a piece of jargon I grew up hearing, but after a climbing friend defined it for me, I thought it was pretty appropriate.) By the end of June, the four Americans lower on the mountain had crumped. It happens a lot on expeditions. And after crump sets in, you’ve psychologically thrown in the towel: you care only about going
home, and you’ll make up all kinds of excuses as to why it makes sense to hike out early.

Meanwhile, Wiessner, Wolfe, and the best Sherpa were pushing hard to establish higher camps. On July 5, carrying heavy loads, Wiessner, Pasang Kikuli, and Tse Tendrup placed Camp VI at 23,400 feet. The next day, Wiessner smoothly led up through the Black Pyramid to 24,500 feet, only a 900-foot traverse away from the slope where the 1938 team had pitched their highest camp.

As impressive as Wiessner’s leading virtually every foot of the route was another of his achievements. After June 21, when he had established Camp IV just below House’s Chimney, except for one very quick trip down to Camp II and back up, Wiessner would spend twenty-four straight days at or above 21,500 feet. Most climbers would simply fall apart under such a regimen—we all need to descend regularly on 8,000ers to recuperate at base camp or slightly higher. The longest continuous stretch I’ve ever spent above 21,500 feet was ten days on the north side of Everest. But Wiessner just seemed to get stronger as he moved higher on K2.

Dudley Wolfe’s performance surprised almost everyone. He was a clumsy enough climber that both Cromwell and Durrance expressed their doubts as to whether he belonged on the mountain at all. But when paired with Wiessner, Wolfe kept chugging upward. He had none of the problems acclimatizing that so afflicted Durrance, and up high, he seemed to have none of the fears that had made Cromwell vow never to go above Camp IV. Storms and cold fazed him very little. Wiessner would later characterize Wolfe as “the most loyal of my comrades.”

While Wiessner had been pushing the route up to 24,500 feet on July 5 and 6, Wolfe had rested in Camp V. Expecting his teammates to arrive from below with loads to equip the higher camps, he was first puzzled, then annoyed when no one showed up. On each of three consecutive days, Wolfe climbed down to the top of House’s Chimney and called out to Camp IV, only a few hundred feet below. No answer came. Where
was
the rest of the team?

On July 10, Wiessner took matters into his own hands. Leaving Wolfe and the Sherpa who had carried loads up high in Camp V, he dashed solo all the way down to Camp II—yet another herculean effort. Rallying his troops and the rest of the Sherpa, Wiessner got the supply train moving once more. Two days later, Durrance made his best effort to go high. With Wolfe, Wiessner, and two Sherpa, he struggled all the way up to Camp VI, but only 200 feet above the tents, he collapsed. With fixed ropes in place, it was a simple matter for him to slide back to Camp VI while the others forged ahead. As Durrance and Wiessner parted, the leader assumed his teammate would wait at Camp VI for more supplies, try to recuperate, and eventually push higher.

Despite Durrance’s continued problems with the altitude, Wiessner still considered him the most skilled of his teammates, and hoped the two would reach the summit together. Only gradually did he shift his plans and substitute Wolfe for Durrance in the summit party. But the third climber going for the top would be Pasang Kikuli, whose talent, experience, and courage Wiessner deeply admired. Had Wiessner climbed K2 with a Sherpa, it would have set a glorious example, one not realized until 1953 on Everest, when John Hunt, recognizing Tenzing Norgay’s vast experience and bold ambition, paired him with Hillary for the May 29 assault.