No Way Down, Life and Death On K2 (2010) (2 page)

They had expected to find a dozen or so climbers milling around the colored domes of nylon tents, taking in the rays, sharpening crampons, waiting around. Down at Base Camp, some mountaineers had said they thought the good weather was going to hold and so they had planned to climb up to Camp Four a day later than everyone else to avoid the main crowd and try for the summit on August 2. The second Korean team would be coming up soon, along with two Australians: one of Meyer's colleagues, and another from the Dutch expedition who had been left out of the first summit ascent by his expedition's leader.

But the other climbers were either inside their tents or still grappling with the slopes up from Camp Three. Meyer and Strang saw
only one other person, an Italian. He had turned back earlier because of altitude sickness. Now he stuck his head out of his tent, next to theirs. His climbing jacket was plastered with “Fila” and other sponsors' logos. He waved and then closed his tent.

Meyer could not help but peer back at the Bottleneck over his shoulder. Nearly a mile away, the climbers were distant dots, filing upward. They were higher on the gully now, about two-thirds of the way up. They were still crowded together dangerously. From this distance, they seemed to be not moving at all. Surely they would turn around soon. Did they have a death wish?

The two men ducked inside their tent. It was only four feet high, with no room to stand. They peeled off their down suits, the linings damp from sweat. They took out the radio, as big as a large cup of coffee, and crashed on top of the two sleeping bags that were spread parallel on the floor. They gulped at a bottle of melted water. It was hot in the tent. They didn't feel like talking much. Soon they would have to start thinking about descending. It would take them a full day to get down.

About twenty minutes later, they were resting when they heard a faint cry outside. It came from far away. Strang thought he heard it again.

They went out of the tent to check the mountain but nothing had changed from when they had last looked. The line of climbers was still stuck in the Bottleneck. The radio was quiet.

Then the Italian stumbled over. His name was Roberto Manni.

“I see!” he said, pointing at the mountain, his face red. “I see!”

Half a mile away, at the base of the Bottleneck, about six hundred feet below the main chain of climbers, a body was tumbling down the ice. A climber had fallen.

The small black figure slowed down and came to a stop just beneath some rocks.

Meyer and Strang ran a few yards and stared up intently at the Bottleneck.

The figure lay with its head pointing down the slope.

Immediately, excited chatter started up on the radio.

“Very bad fall!” Meyer heard someone say. “He is alive. He is still moving. It is one of the Serbs.”

Friday, August 1

W
alk east along dusty tracks from the village of Askole and within three days you will glimpse in the distance a wonder of the world, the rock-strewn Baltoro glacier and a giant's parade of ocher and black granite mountains, topped with snow and wreathed in clouds.

Eric Meyer and the other teams traveled this route in 2008, entering the inner Karakoram, the heart of the tallest mountain range in the world. The Karakoram range is part of the western Himalayas and forms a watershed between the Indian subcontinent and the deserts of Central Asia. Here, four peaks higher than 26,000 feet stand within fifteen miles of one another. Walk deeper into this dominion of ice and moraine and finally, after another three days, above all these lofty giants suddenly appears K2, the second-tallest mountain in the world.

K2's naming has become legend. In September 1856, a British surveyor of the Great Trigonometric Survey of India, Lieutenant Thomas G. Montgomerie, laden with theodolite, heliotrope, and plane table, climbed to a peak in Kashmir, his job to fix the imperial border of the Raj.

One hundred and forty miles to the north he glimpsed two formidable mountains, which he sketched in his notebook in ink, above his own wavy, proud signature. He named them K1 and K2. Montgomerie's “K” was for Karakoram. (He would log K1 through K32,
and recorded K2's height at 28,278 feet, only about 30 feet off.) K1 was later discovered to bear a local name and became fixed on the maps as Masherbrum. But K2 didn't and so Montgomerie's name stuck.

Five years after Montgomerie's visit, another tough, steely British empire builder, Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen, came closer to K2, becoming the first European to ascend the Baltoro glacier. In recognition of his feat, in 1888 a motion was proposed about K2 at the Royal Geographical Society in London that “in future it should be known as Peak Godwin-Austen.” The motion was rejected but the name persisted, even into the middle decades of the twentieth century on some maps and in newspaper accounts. It carried colonial overtones, however, and in the end, “K2” won out, although Godwin-Austen's name still marks the glacier at the foot of the mountain.

After the imperial surveyors, Western explorers and travelers soon followed, encroaching ever deeper into this wondrous realm in hobnailed boots, tweed suits, and skirts. Two prominent visitors—an American couple, William Hunter Workman and his wife, the New England heiress and suffragette Fanny Bullock Workman—were making a bicycle tour of India in 1898 when they decided to visit the Himalayas. Years later, they explored the Siachen glacier to the southeast of K2, and they made first ascents of several Karakoram summits. The couple was notorious. William was a retired surgeon who believed no one could survive a night above 22,000 feet, and Fanny had an irritating habit of carving her initials and date of passage on mountain walls, as well as clearing foot traffic with whip and revolver.

In 1902, a six-man expedition made up of Swiss, Austrians, and Britons made the first serious summit attempt on K2. Among them was the English climber and occultist Aleister Crowley, who a few years later would assume the name “666,” and whose wild-haired antics earned him the title “Wickedest Man in the World” in the Brit
ish press and a place years after his death on the cover of the Beatles' album
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
.

Following a nine-week trek, undertaken while carrying three tons of luggage, including volumes of Crowley's library, the expedition made as many as five attempts at the summit. Crowley preferred a route up the southeast spur of the mountain but the other climbers argued for a switch to the northeast ridge. They reached about 21,000 feet on K2's side. But the effort broke down when, among other things, one of the Austrians collapsed with pulmonary edema—an acute mountain sickness involving a buildup of fluid in the lungs. A disappointed and semidelirious Crowley, suffering himself from malarial fevers and chills, threatened one of his colleagues with a revolver and was disarmed by a knee to the stomach. The expedition made its retreat in disarray, although they had climbed higher on K2 than anyone before.

The mountain cast a wide spell. In 1909, seven years after Crowley's attempt, it was the turn of Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy-Aosta, Duke of the Abruzzi. A son of the king of Spain, and grandson of a king of Italy, Amedeo was a mountain climbing fanatic who a decade earlier had carried ten bedsteads up onto Alaska's Malaspina glacier. (He also hailed from the part of Italy that two decades later would be made famous by Ernest Hemingway in
A Farewell to Arms
.) When the duke visited the American Alpine Club at the Astor Hotel in New York, the ballroom was decorated in his honor: “great blocks of ice fashioned like mountains, with men roped climbing their steeps,” according to a report in the
New York Times
. He chose K2 because it was relatively unmapped, but he had another objective. He wanted to set the world altitude record, which at the time was held by two Norwegians.

Surrounding his trip in great secrecy, he traveled incognito to London for supplies. Presumably the secrecy was due to the fact that he didn't want anyone to reach K2 first. But he may also, accord
ing to some history books, have been fleeing a very public (in the American press) romantic entanglement with Katherine Elkins, the rich, auburn-haired, horse-riding daughter of a United States senator from West Virginia, Stephen B. Elkins. The duke had likely met the Elkinses in Rome, where they traveled in the summer to buy antiques, but the romance was opposed by both families.

The duke set sail from Marseille on the P&O steamer
Oceana
with six and a half tons of luggage, bound for Bombay and thence to K2, for the glory of Italy and the House of Savoy. He was accompanied by a fifty-year-old mountain photographer, Vittorio Sella, whose glass plates and emulsions would yield some of the most beautiful pictures ever taken of K2.

The duke's ten-man team passed through Srinagar, where he was seen off by the local British governor with a royal escort of brightly decorated shikaras, or riverboats, each rowed by fifteen oarsmen. He traveled in luxury: The expedition's four-layered sleeping bags consisted of one layer of camel hair, one of eiderdown, one of sheepskin, and an outer layer of waterproof canvas. He first caught sight of the mountain from Concordia, a junction of two sweeping glaciers a few miles away at the center of an amphitheater of peaks. The duke's awe shines through his description. It was, he declared,
l'indiscusso sovrano della regione:
“the indisputable sovereign of the region, gigantic and solitary, hidden from human sight by innumerable ranges, jealously defended by a vast throng of varied peaks, protected from invasion by miles and miles of glacier.”

Supplied from Urdukas, a camp several miles away down the Baltoro glacier, with a stream of fresh eggs, meat, water, fuel, mail, and newspapers, the duke and his entourage ascended partway up the southeast ridge, a rock rib rising directly above what would be named the Godwin-Austen glacier. The route he followed would become the main path for future ascents of the mountain and would forever bear the duke's name, the Abruzzi Spur. In his wake as he passed, he
named other K2 landmarks in his expedition's honor, like a modern Adam discovering a new world: the Negrotto Pass, after the duke's aide-de-camp; the Sella Pass; and the Savoia Glacier.

The duke eventually set the world altitude record by climbing partway up another, nearby peak, Chogolisa. But he was frustrated by K2's seemingly insuperable steepness, and turned back at 20,000 feet, declaring that K2 had defeated him and it would remain forever unconquerable.

“After weeks of examination, after hours of contemplation and search for the secret of the mountain, the Duke was finally obliged to yield to the conviction that K2 is not to be climbed,” wrote Filippo de Filippi, a biologist and doctor who accompanied the duke and authored the expedition book.

It was up to another Italian expedition to prove the duke wrong, years later.

In the years immediately following World War II, military hostilities may have ended around the world but national rivalries were still playing out in the arena of the Himalayas. In 1950, an expedition of French climbers was the first in the world to scale a peak above 26,000 feet when it reached the summit of Annapurna 1 in Nepal. In 1953, Mount Everest, the highest of them all, fell to the British, news of the event reaching London on the eve of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and prompting national celebration.

In the spring of 1954, it was Italy's turn to embellish its national standing, and recast its postwar funk, when an expedition arrived in Pakistan to lay siege to the slopes of K2.

The expedition comprised eleven climbers, four scientists, a doctor, a filmmaker, ten high-altitude Hunza porters, and five hundred additional porters. Altogether, they shouldered more than thirteen tons of supplies, including 230 cylinders of supplementary oxygen.

The expedition's autocratic leader, Ardito Desio, was a geographer and geologist from Palmanova, in northeast Italy. An ambitious
man, he was nicknamed Il Ducetto, or Little Mussolini, by the team's members. To signify his serious intent, before approaching on foot Desio and three companions circled the mountain in a DC-3. The Pakistani army aided his approach by building bridges across ravines, and, in an echo of the preceding war, through his radio in Base Camp he urged his climbers on the slopes to become “champions of your race.” On the trek in, through the un peopled terrain of the surrounding valley, some of the porters went snow-blind after Desio refused to issue them proper sunglasses. The porters later staged a revolt but were placated by the Italians' cigarettes and baksheesh, and by the intervention of the military liaison officer, Colonel Ata-Ullah, although some of the porters then stole the team's flour and biscuits.

The climb itself was notable for the use of a steel windlass and a thousand-foot steel cable to winch heavy supplies up the mountain. And after sixty-three days of preparation—and the death of one climber, Mario Puchoz, thirty-six, a mountain guide from Courmayeur, due to complications that were initially diagnosed as pneumonia but were later accepted as pulmonary edema—by the evening of July 30, 1954, two climbers had reached 26,000 feet and were within a day or so's climb of the top.

At first light, the two men, Achille Compagnoni, a forty-year-old climber from Lombardy who was Desio's expedition favorite, and his partner, twenty-eight-year-old Lino Lacedelli, from Cortina d'Ampezzo, climbed up toward the summit. At one point Compagnoni slipped and fell but he landed in soft snow. At another, Lacedelli, removing his gloves to clean his glasses, found his fingers were white and without sensation. The two men were carrying heavy oxygen canisters. Within six hundred feet of the summit, however, they felt dizzy; the gas had run out and they wrenched off their masks.

They believed that life without oxygen above around 28,000 feet was impossible beyond about ten minutes; they waited for the end. When it didn't come, and they found they could breathe, they trudged
on, though they were plunged into a hallucinatory state, both men believing their late colleague, Puchoz, was following close behind.

At a few minutes before 6 p.m., the slope flattened, they linked arms, and with a “Together” they stepped onto the summit. K2 had been defeated. The
New York Times
ran the story on August 4, 1954: “Italians Conquer World's Second Highest Peak; Mt. Godwin Austen in Kashmir Is Climbed in 76-Day Effort.”

 

Back in Italy, the expedition was predictably greeted by a wave of patriotic fervor, a postage stamp was issued in the climbers' honor, and they were received by Pope Pius XII. There also followed decades of acrimony over the manner of the summit victory.

On the evening before their summit attempt, Compagnoni had pitched the final camp higher than had been agreed with the rest of the team and concealed it behind a rock. He did this because there were limited oxygen sets and he did not want another climber, Walter Bonatti, who was coming up from below with a Hunza porter called Mahdi, to take his or Compagnoni's place. Bonatti was a talented, younger mountaineer, less favored by the leader, Desio, and the Italian climbing establishment.

As a result of the concealment, Bonatti and Mahdi were forced to spend the night out in the open on a small ice shelf on the side of the mountain. They had actually carried the oxygen sets for the summit and they left them in the snow. Mahdi, who was without proper climbing boots, ran back down desperately at first light. He survived but lost half of both his feet from frostbite and almost all his fingers.

The rancor lasted for years in Italy. Bonatti went on to become one of the most successful and respected climbers of his generation, and mountaineers generally side with his version of events. In the 1960s, Compagnoni fought back, claiming that Bonatti had siphoned off oxygen from the tanks, thus endangering the lives of the two
summiteers. He said that Bonatti had also convinced Mahdi to accompany him to the final camp by falsely promising him a crack at the summit. Bonatti won a libel victory in court against a journalist who had aired Compagnoni's claims. Desio would return to Pakistan in 1987 to settle finally the question of which peak was higher, K2 or Everest. (A University of Washington astronomer had announced that new data from a navy satellite showed K2 might be 800 feet higher than previously believed and taller than Everest; using better technology, Desio and his colleagues found otherwise.) He also faced questions about whether he had concealed the truth about what had happened on the mountain.

Despite the rancor, the Italian team's achievement still stood. Nearly one hundred years after the first sighting by Thomas Montgomerie of the Royal Engineers, men had finally reached the snows at the top of K2.