K2 (9 page)

Ambivalence is one of the hardest states of mind to handle on an expedition. That night, in a fit of vexation, I wrote in my diary:

The Abruzzi Ridge may indeed be the easiest route on K2, but it’s no cakewalk. All through that summer on the mountain, I was acutely aware of a startling historical fact. The last successful ascent of the Abruzzi had come in 1986—and of the many climbers on the route that year, six had died on the descent. In the intervening years, 1987 through 1991, fourteen different expeditions had attacked the Abruzzi Ridge. Not a single climber from any of those fourteen parties had reached the summit.

By 1992, only five Americans had climbed K2: Jim Wickwire and his three teammates by the northeast ridge in 1978, and Steve Swenson on the north ridge in 1990. No Americans had yet climbed the Abruzzi. Although that was not a major factor in my motivation, I couldn’t help but realize that I might be part of the first American team to get up the classic line by which K2 had first been climbed in 1954.

On July 29, Thor, Chantal, Neal, and I fought our way back up to CIII. We found it completely buried in snow—there wasn’t even the top of a tent pole sticking out of the drifts. We spent hours digging out the camp. One tent had been completely destroyed; the other was salvageable, but when we repitched it, it was so cramped that it offered room, as I put it in my diary, only “for one and a half people.” I helped Thor and Chantal set up their own tent, then crawled into my coffinlike bivy tent. Neal
settled into the tent we had just repitched. Later in the day, Vlad and Gnady arrived from below, climbed through, and eventually camped slightly above us. Alex was also headed up, about a day behind.

It was a miserable night; I didn’t sleep very well, as I had to keep getting up to shovel new snow and spindrift off my shelter. In the morning, the wind was still howling. “Tough decision as to what to do,” I wrote later. “It’s Neal’s last shot but it’s terrible up here. Decided to bail down. Thor & Chantal stayed.
Really
bad going down.”

From the lower camps, our communication with our “teammates” was limited to a prearranged 7:00
P.M.
radio call. These calls were cryptic and frustrating at best, as the Russians translated little of their information for us. Sometimes the Russian chatter droned interminably on and we simply gave up listening, since we seemed to be excluded anyway. On July 31, those of us back in base camp waited nervously. Finally we got some news. “Vlad [and Gnady] made it to bottom of summit pyramid,” I recorded in my diary. “Alex is at CIII and Thor is ? Very nice day, but Vlad said snow was chest deep.”

August 1 was another good day on the mountain. I was still biding my time before making my own surge up the mountain. For Neal, any hopes of the summit had been dashed, but by now Scott was back in good shape and ready to charge. That day, we knew, Vlad and Gnady were going for the top. Forty-one days after I’d arrived at base camp, somebody from our team was finally making a serious assault.

Yet 7:00
P.M.
came and went with no radio call from the summit pair. Granted, I had never formed any close friendships with the Russians, and Vlad had really ticked me off with his every-man-for-himself philosophy. That day, however, I couldn’t help but worry about what was going on high on K2, as I silently pleaded with the mountain gods to be kind to those two determined climbers. We all tried to send positive energy their way.

Finally we found out what had happened. Vlad and Gnady had left Camp IV, pitched on the Shoulder at 26,000 feet, at 3:00
A.M.
Hindered by deep snow, they had climbed agonizingly slowly, but they’d refused to turn around. They’d reached the summit together at 9:00
P.M.,
after eighteen hours of climbing.

When I found this out, I was astounded and disturbed. In my book, eighteen hours was far too long to keep going for the summit, and 9:00
P.M.
was far too late to get there. But these were really tough guys. Did I think I could climb any faster? On my own summit attempt, what could I do differently? “Should we leave CIV @ 8
P.M
.?” I mused in my diary. “Gonna be a bitch!”

That night, Gnady made it down to Camp IV, but Vlad bivouacked, exhausted, below the summit. Remarkably, he not only survived the night but suffered no frostbite. The two Russians descended all the way to base camp on August 3.

Meanwhile, on August 2, Thor, Chantal, and Alex had climbed to the Shoulder and set up their own camp at 26,000 feet. Their plan was to go for the summit in the morning.

The same day they made their attempt, August 3, Scott and I finally launched our own summit bid. At last, all our hard work on the mountain was paying dividends. To save time and take advantage of the good weather, we climbed 7,500 vertical feet, from base all the way to Camp III, in a single sustained push. It took me only eleven hours to make that monumental ascent, Scott a few hours longer. In terms of sheer efficiency of movement, that day remains one of the best I have ever had in the mountains.

As we climbed, of course, we had no idea what was going on with our three teammates above. At Camp III, we listened to the 7:00
P.M.
radio call, but there was no word of their progress. In those days it was not unusual not to make any calls during a summit push, because you were so caught up in the effort of climbing or hadn’t even bothered to carry the bulky radio with you. Our only option was to keep the radio on and wait for word from the summit trio.

As you climb the Abruzzi Ridge, for thousands of feet the summit pyramid is out of sight, eclipsed by the cliffs and slopes above you. It’s only when you reach the Shoulder, at 26,000 feet, that the majestic upper sweep of the mountain suddenly bursts into view.

Caught up as we were in our own great day of climbing, Scott and I didn’t give much thought to Thor, Chantal, and Alex. They were experienced
climbers who ought to be able to take care of themselves. Inside our sleeping bags at Camp III, Scott and I were wired and exuberant. The next day we would push on to Camp IV. If the weather held, we would go for the top on August 5.

We were too excited to get to sleep at first. Instead, we just tossed and turned in our bags. And then, at 10:00
P.M.,
we heard the crackle of our radio. I sat up, turned on my headlamp, grabbed the walkie-talkie, and answered the call.

It was Thor, transmitting from Camp IV. “Hey, guys,” he said. I could hear the tension in his voice. “Chantal and Alex aren’t back. I don’t know where they are.”

Oh, shit!
I said to myself. In the headlamp beam, I looked at Scott. He had the same look of disgust and concern on his face.
There goes our summit try
, I thought.

Thor and Alex, it turned out, had left Camp IV at 5:30 that morning. Chantal hadn’t gotten off until 7:00. But then, even though she was climbing without bottled oxygen, she caught up with the two guys in the Bottleneck and surged past them. It was an extraordinary performance at such an altitude.

After a long, hard day of climbing, realizing he would reach the summit too late in the day, rather than risking a bivouac, Thor prudently gave up his attempt just a few hundred feet below the top and headed down. As he would learn only the next day, Chantal had pushed on and reached the summit at 5:00
P.M.
Alex didn’t top out until 7:00. On the descent, he came across Chantal. Afraid to go down by herself in the dark, she had started to bivouac. Almost berating her, he roused her out of her apathy and convinced her to go down with him.

At first light on August 4, Scott and I prepared to head up from Camp III. Our summit attempt had been transformed into a rescue mission or, even worse, into a search for missing climbers. But then, at 7:00
A.M.,
Thor came on the radio again. Alex and Chantal had just arrived, staggering into camp after a descent that had stretched through the whole night. Chantal was completely exhausted, snowblind, and suffering
from what she thought was frostbite. Alex had saved her life, but now, as if he felt he had done all that was required of him, the Russian dumped Chantal in Thor’s lap and headed on down the mountain. He barely said good-bye.

Chantal was still virtually helpless. So, Scott and I realized, it would now be our job to go to her aid. Thor could never get her down to base camp by himself. At least, I thought as I gathered gear for our mission, it was a rescue and not a search.

That morning, however, everything seemed to conspire against us. By the time Scott and I got going, the visibility had dropped to almost zero, and the snow conditions were really bad. For a couple of hours, barely able to see where we were going, we plowed upward through deep snow, before deciding to call it quits and head back.

Late that evening, Alex came into sight above Camp III. He was pretty wasted. We climbed up a little way to help him down, got him into a tent, and brewed up lots of drinks, because he was severely dehydrated. It surprised me that at this point, Alex didn’t even seem curious about what was going on with Chantal.

That same day, Thor had started down from Camp IV, leading Chantal, who could barely see her feet in front of her. Because of the marginal conditions, they got only a short distance before having to stop on the lower edge of the Shoulder. Fortunately, Thor had brought a tent, but the emergency shelter he set up on that precarious slope was more like a bivoauc than a true camp. I could only imagine the monumental task he had taking care of Chantal in such trying circumstances.

The next day, August 5, Scott and I got up at 4:30
A.M.,
then waited for a break in the weather to head back up, since the situation above us seemed to be getting more dire by the hour. Alex was too wiped out to help at all; later that day he would head down from Camp III on his own. Finally the weather improved just enough. Scott and I were off at 7:30. There were clouds scudding by, alternating with sunbursts. The snow everywhere was deep and soft.

By midday, we had reached the last headwall beneath the Shoulder.

Suddenly we caught sight of Thor and Chantal, two small dots above us flickering in and out of clouds and mist. The wind was blowing steadily in a minor gale, and little spindrift avalanches had started sliding down the headwall.

Throughout the expedition so far, I had always erred on the side of caution. I’d refused to climb in conditions the Russians seemed to think were worth the risk. I’d headed down when cockier climbers headed up. Now, all at once, I felt that the slope Scott and I were trying to climb was ready to avalanche. Scott hadn’t yet come to the same realization—I attribute that to the fact that I’d done a lot more guiding than he had and had learned to be hypervigilant about avalanche conditions. “Wait a minute, Scott,” I said. “This is not a good slope.”

It’s an eternal and inevitable fact in mountaineering, as in most dangerous pursuits, that you can get sucked into exceeding the boundaries of your own best judgment of acceptable risk when you go to the rescue of someone else in trouble. The classic example occurred on K2 in 1953, when, trying to save the life of a crippled teammate, seven members of the American expedition came extremely close to dying in one horrible, interlinked fall. That accident had taken place almost exactly where Scott and I now stood.

Later I would think about the sad fate of Jean-Marc Boivin. One of the finest French climbers of his day, he was also, during the 1980s, the boldest extreme skier in the world. Boivin performed scores of first ski descents in the Alps, on couloirs and faces where the slightest slip meant certain death. He also perfected the arts of BASE jumping and para-penting (hang gliding with a frameless parachute that unfurls from a pack on your back). In 1988 he electrified the climbing world by jumping off the summit of Everest and parapenting to a lower camp in only twelve minutes.

In 1990, at the age of thirty-nine, Boivin was starring in a made-for-TV adventure for
Ushuaïa
, a chic French documentary show about extreme sports. He and a female costar were set to BASE jump off a cliff near Angel Falls, Venezuela—a piece of cake for Boivin. But when the woman, jumping first, hit the cliff glancingly on the way down, Boivin impetuously
jumped to go to her aid, without making his usual meticulous preparations. He hit a tree near the bottom of the jump, then lay on the ground, injured. A helicopter flew by to rescue him, but Boivin signaled the pilot to go after his costar first. She survived, miraculously, with only minor injuries. By the time the chopper had returned to gather up Boivin, he had died of internal hemorrhaging. He left behind a wife and small children.

If we had been climbing only for our own reasons, to get to the Shoulder and establish Camp IV, Scott and I would not have pushed the head-wall in the conditions that now engulfed us. It was the very real possibility that Chantal—and perhaps Thor, as well—might die without our help that drove us to such an extreme and dangerous effort.

Scott and I were roped together with a fifty-foot line I had scrounged at Camp III. By now, I had a foreboding sense of imminent disaster. “Man,” I said to Scott, “let’s not get ourselves killed doing this.” The slope we were climbing seemed triggered to avalanche at any moment. Scott, who was above me, sat down on the slope, facing out. Almost in a panic, I started digging frantically with my ice ax, trying to excavate a hole I could hunker down in if the avalanche came. My thought was that this pocket in the snow would protect me from the brunt of the blow if the slope cut loose.

And then, sure enough, it came. Scott never saw it. I had time just to look up and see a wave of snow swallow him before he disappeared from sight. I quickly tucked my head and upper body into my hole, thrust the pick of my ax into the slope, and put all my weight on top of it. The slide took so long to carry Scott down the slope and then past me that I began to think,
Wow, I got away with it!