The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (18 page)

Seeing that the weather might again turn sour, Tony decided to head back to Camp II in the morning. He had told Fritz that Camp IV was as high as he was going to climb, and here he was. Looking around, he realized that once Jack and Joe finally reached them they’d have more men than tent space for the night.

“Don’t worry,” Dudley volunteered, “I’ll head back up to V. It’s just on the other side of the chimney.”

After saying goodbye, Tony and Fritz settled into their tent and Dudley climbed the demanding 80-foot chimney to Camp V, once again alone.

Although Dudley had been used to having paid guides in Europe and Canada who prepared and cleaned up after his meals, he quickly realized that once on a Himalayan mountain such luxuries were simply not available, so he familiarized himself with the quirky Primus stove. The long days alone were tough enough; not having enough water and food was painful. So every day he would painstakingly lay out all the necessary tools for dinner: stove, canister of gasoline, pot filled with snow on the burner with a larger bucket of fresh snow outside the tent to replenish the pot as the light, airy snow quickly melted, soup packets and dried meats and vegetables he planned to cook, and finally the matches. Carefully positioning the stove near the door of the tent so that there was ventilation but not enough wind to make sustaining the flame impossible, Dudley would sit cross-legged and bend over it before striking the first match. If he were lucky, the first match took. Usually he was not and it took several to get and then keep the notoriously tricky stove lit. Years later, K2 summiter and renowned high-altitude specialist Louis Reichardt would comment that it was a miracle any of the early climbers were able to keep hydrated, given how horrendously Primus stoves operated at high altitude. But Dudley managed to figure it out and, while he spent weeks alone in the unforgiving environs, he never complained.

Below him, Jack struggled to reach the tents at Camp IV. When he finally did he looked up and saw Dudley once again keeping vigil at the top of House’s Chimney in case any loads needed hauling up. Waving and calling out, the two men greeted each other for the first time in twenty-one days. That night Jack “reclined” but didn’t sleep a wink as the sudden 1,000-foot increase in altitude wreaked havoc with his already struggling system. He had also had to haul Joe up the mountain, as the transport officer’s inexperience and increasing altitude sickness became an enormous burden and danger to the others, particularly through the rain of rockfall below Camp III. In addition, the more Jack thought about actually going for the summit, the more a sense of panic descended on him, crushing him. In the morning, he choked down some Cream of Wheat and started out behind Fritz and Joe, his fear growing with every step up the mountain. After some terrifying moments in the chimney with Joe, who would suddenly stare off into space unaware of everything and everyone around him, Jack finally convinced him that he was at his altitude record. Joe agreed and retreated to Camp IV and then descended with Tony.

Finally reaching the top of the chimney, Jack greeted Dudley, who enthusiastically took his hand and clapped him on the back. Dudley showed them into Camp V, where he handed Jack a waiting cup of hot bouillon. Asking Jack if he could bother him for a medical opinion, Dudley quickly took off his boot to show his frostbitten toes, one of them already developing a blister. Jack remembered Charlie Houston’s warning about frostbite and told Dudley that he should descend to lower altitudes in order for it to heal properly. Dudley shook his head as he put his boot back on.
I’m going up. It’ll be fine.

But isn’t it very painful?
Jack asked, having had his ear bent by George’s complaints the week before.

Sure
, Dudley said,
but everything hurts. So you just keep going, right?

He may be crazy,
Jack thought,
but he’s determined. I’ll give him that.

Jack told him to keep the toes dry and clean and whenever possible give them some sunlight without letting the sun burn them. Dudley thanked him and rose to help pack up the camp. Jack shook his head as he struggled to his feet. Then Jack, Dudley, Fritz, Pasang, and Dawa Sherpa continued on to Camp VI, a dismal collection of three tents perched on the edge of a 45-degree slope.

One of the unofficial rules of high-altitude climbing is to “Climb high, sleep low.” As a climber moves up the mountain and reaches his high point for the day, he spends an hour or so there before descending to a lower camp to sleep, thereby enabling the body to experience the thinner air and make its immediate adjustments while allowing it to restore itself by sleeping in the thicker air. If a climber is doing well with the ever-thinner air, the rule is less important so long as he ascends slowly, usually less than 1,000 feet a day, but if he is already struggling, the rule is crucial for his condition. Unfortunately for Jack, in 1939 this rule was still unknown.

After a hot meal, Dudley and Jack bedded down for the night, but Jack could barely lie flat due to the overwhelming feeling that he was suffocating under a great weight on his chest, like a blanket of rocks. Yet, despite his own inability to acclimatize, Jack felt it necessary to once again tell Dudley that he should not climb any higher on the mountain, that his lack of experience and skill made him dependent on someone else to bring him down and therefore he was a burden that became more perilous with every foot he ascended.

While Dudley knew that Jack’s charges had some merit—hadn’t he himself asked Fritz if he had the skills and experience for K2?—they also stung. Not only was he the only member of the team who was actually climbing and helping Fritz build camps, he had made Jack’s trip possible by providing the $1,300 balance to the expedition coffers that Jack had not been able to contribute himself. Rather than thanking him, it seemed as if Jack had taken one look at Dudley and dismissed him as a climber and team member. Dudley had had enough of the younger man’s arrogance and shot back that it was he, Dudley, who was feeling fine, strong in fact, while Jack was unable to climb much above Camp II at 19,000 feet without crippling illness—a charge obviously true, with Jack dizzy and struggling to breathe as they spoke. Still, Jack was unwilling to admit to Dudley or to himself that Dudley was simply stronger at altitude. Instead, Jack blamed his own weak performance on the fact that, unlike Dudley, he hadn’t had the “luxury” of climbing and resting at each camp. Rather, he had had to organize and pack loads, tend to the sick, and keep the low camps serviceable while the other two climbed like pampered clients on a guided tour. He was exhausted.

Even though Jack’s outburst felt like a child’s petulant whine, in the morning Dudley once again went to Fritz. He didn’t want to be a burden or a danger to anyone, and he asked Fritz one more time if Jack’s charges were true. Was he a liability on the slopes above? Would he be stuck high on the mountain unless somebody was there to bring him down?

“Don’t worry,” Fritz assured him. “If you should get too slow or find it too difficult higher up, you will stay in reserve.”

Ironically and tragically, Jack was probably right, and may have been observing in Dudley’s clumsiness and stubbornness the early signs of acute mountain sickness, caused by lack of oxygen, dehydration, and exhaustion. Much like a person who has had too much drink and boasts, “Of course I can drive, just watch me!” Dudley was no doubt impaired by the lack of oxygen yet oblivious to just how severely affected he was. But with Fritz only looking up to the summit and Dudley unaware of his weakened condition, Jack’s warning again went unheeded. The matter was closed. In the morning the men headed up toward Camp VII across some of the mountain’s most treacherous sections of steep, blue ice.

After only a hundred feet, Jack was filled with a crushing panic:
If I don’t get off this mountain now, soon I may not be able to.
He couldn’t breathe. He was so dizzy he had to walk with his hands stretched out like a B-movie zombie to protect himself from a fall. He felt as if he would vomit at any minute, if in fact he had been able to eat anything. He called ahead to Fritz, telling him he needed to go back to Camp VI and recover. After a quick conference, it was decided that Jack would descend with four Sherpas for the night and see how he felt the next day. If he was still sick in the morning, he would send the Sherpas back up with supplies and continue down alone.

Fritz watched him go, shaking his head in disgust at Jack’s refusal to push through the pain as he and Dudley had done and continued to do. You didn’t get to the top of a mountain like K2 without a lot of suffering and, yes, pain. Even as he watched the broken, sick man descend, Fritz still believed that all Jack needed was a rest and he’d be able to rejoin him and Dudley for the summit assault.

As he climbed down, Jack stopped to pant and choke every few feet, clinging to the rope between him and Dawa Sherpa as if his life depended on it—as indeed it did. That night back at Camp VI, his heart pounded so wildly he thought it would explode in his chest and he breathed air in great, gasping gulps but never felt satisfied. It was as if he were running through thick sand while trying to breathe through a straw. He could never get enough air. Finally, fearing he would die in his sleep, he asked Dawa to lie close to him to monitor whether he was still breathing. At 5:30 in the morning, he awoke the four Sherpas who had descended with him and, instead of sending them back up the mountain with supplies, Jack ordered them to descend with him because he felt unsafe. Often crawling on all fours, Jack made Camp IV by late morning. There, he instructed two of the Sherpas, Phinsoo and Tsering, to climb back up to the summit team with supplies, and he continued down to Camp II, taking Dawa and Kikuli with him. Kikuli, their strongest and most experienced Sherpa, had suffered a serious recurrence of frostbite while establishing the high camps with Fritz. Unwilling to lose his toes, maybe even his feet, and therefore his career, Kikuli had told Fritz he was finished high on the mountain, but would remain in the low camps to help organize loads for the summit assault team. Again, Fritz stubbornly refused to accept he had lost another climber and assumed all Kikuli needed was a rest at lower altitude and that he would soon re-ascend to attempt the summit with him.

When Jack arrived in Camp II, he found it an utter shambles. Tony was exhausted from having brought down Joe and the wounded Sonam, who lay dazed and bleeding in a corner. Around them was squalor; filthy dishes, remnants of food, and scattered gear littered the tent. It looked like a scene from a battle, and these guys were definitely not looking like the victors. But as Jack tried to tidy up and organize the next day’s loads, he was stricken with a coughing spell and could do nothing but get in his sleeping bag and nap.

Seven thousand feet above them, the climbing team was officially down to Wiessner and Wolfe with Sherpas Pasang Lama, Tendrup, and Kitar carrying heavy loads of gear for the upper camps. Cutting steps into the icy slopes, the ragged quintet finally established Camp VIII at 25,300 feet on a narrow ice shelf they carved out of the slope that afternoon, July 14.

Both Fritz and Dudley had frostbitten feet and, like those below them, they were well worn by their nearly six weeks on the mountain. Because the 1938 team had left many of its ropes on the route, Fritz had something of a map as he led the way up the mountain, but the task of breaking trail and anchoring new safety ropes where the old ones looked too weather-beaten to be safe was still enormous. With Dudley doggedly following in his cut steps or on the thin rope, the two crawled upward toward the roof of the world.

Alice and Dudley Wolfe (on the right) on their honeymoon cruise, November 1934.
(Courtesy of the Dudley F. Rochester and Dudley F. Wolfe Family)

T
welve thousand miles and a world away, Alice Damrosch Wolfe sat on the porch of her family’s estate in Bar Harbor, Maine, reading a letter from Dudley. It had been filled with sand and she absently brushed at the tiny crystals in her lap as she read the letter. She looked out to the table-flat Atlantic Ocean, the last of the day’s light playing across the surface of the water. Imagine. Halfway around the world, Dudley was dipping his toes in the Indus River. Well, he had been, anyway. She checked the date of the letter: May 11. He had dipped his toes seven weeks ago. Seven weeks. She wondered where he was now, trying but not succeeding to imagine his travels from the sandy banks of the Indus through the wild river gorges and terraced villages to the towering mountains of northern India. According to the rough schedule he had given her, he should be well on his way toward the summit by now.

Although she had promised herself not to burden him with her concern, it had not abated. It hadn’t helped that their friends in St. Anton who knew him well and had been with them at the hunting preserve had filled her head with new worries.

“But Alice,” Johann Falsch, the owner of her apartment in St. Anton had warned, “Dudley has never had to take care of himself—he has always had guides. These expeditions don’t allow for that sort of caretaking on the mountains.”

By then, Dudley had departed on the trip and she was left to worry and wait for his letters. When they came, she devoured every word he had written. She only wished he’d write more. His details were wonderful, if a bit glossed over. She felt as if he were holding back some of the more grueling details, maybe to spare her any more worry. He had written about concerns he had with the expedition, but he didn’t elaborate—he never did talk much about troubles. He was not one to criticize; she had always loved that about him. She was quick to find fault and tell the person flat out, but he wasn’t. He was apt to simply walk away from an offending comment or situation rather than engage the offender. She had marveled at an exchange between Dudley and his brother Clifford over the family business. While Clifford had rather nastily attacked his younger brother’s lifestyle and lack of profession in a series of letters over the past couple of years, Dudley had remained calm and measured, giving Clifford straightforward answers to his snipes. She wondered whether Clifford cared more about the money than he did about his brother, or his happiness.

Well
, she thought,
I suppose Clifford considers happiness bourgeois and overrated. If it’s not on a spreadsheet, perhaps it doesn’t enter in his realm.

She looked out again at the ocean: Dudley’s ocean. She half expected to see the
Highland Light
come around the corner of Frenchman Bay with Dudley waving from the helm as he had so many times before. It was somehow unfathomable that Dudley was in such a foreign, wild place. And even though he said he was thriving, she felt a growing apprehension. She had opposed the trip from the outset, but Dudley had been insistent, assuring her that he was up to the expedition’s demands. She couldn’t help but feel the trip was more about Dudley proving something than just another of his wild exploits and, as a woman with her own record of daring pursuits and near misses, she knew the danger of adding an agenda to an adventure. She put his letter down and looked out at the full moon rising from the water, finding a measure of comfort that Dudley was under the same sky. She couldn’t wait until he came home with all of his stories; he promised he was keeping a detailed diary and that he would read her whole sections describing the rich tapestry of where he had been and what he had experienced.

The past year had been hell on her. He had tried to explain why he wanted to end their marriage, that as much as he loved her, he wasn’t in love with her and that he’d be happier if they divorced. Her first marriage to Pleasants had been so devoid of passion that she had barely noticed its passing, but this was different. She and Dudley had had a life together and she cherished him, his opinions, and his perspectives on the world, particularly now that it appeared the world was headed for another war. Mostly she had adored just having him there, his quiet and gentle presence in the other room or on the preserve or in their apartment in New York. Before she met Dudley, she had been independent so long she hadn’t known what it was like to have the security of a companion. Then, as she faced losing him, she nearly collapsed. She missed him more than she thought possible. Thankfully, the Falsches had taken care of her and helped her through the worst of it. But it hadn’t been easy and she still longed for him every day.

Before she had left Austria for Maine a few weeks before, she had stopped and bought Dudley a box of his favorite handkerchiefs in Salzburg. Even though she had given him a brand new box before he left, she couldn’t think of anything else she could send that might actually make it to the mountain and not be unduly heavy. Besides, she reasoned, given how filthy the ones he had must be getting, he would need new ones anyway.

Picking up her pen, she tried to sound light and playful.

“My dear Dudley Francis,” she began as she often did, poking gentle fun at his stuffy Brahmin name, and wrote a chatty letter about nothing in particular, hoping to convey all of her affection and none of her worry. After all, she wasn’t even married to the man any more.

She closed the letter, “Write me often. Always, Your loving Alice.”

D
OWN THE COAST
a few miles in Glen Cove, Maine, Clifford paced back and forth across the long porch which overlooked the ocean. As June turned to July, Dudley’s letters had come less and less frequently, and they were more and more troubled. At the start of his trip, the letters were newsy and cheerful, and Clifford had responded to each immediately, filling Dudley in on the stagnant markets and his ardent desire to see Roosevelt ousted from the presidency before he took the country down his socialistic drainpipe with him. But somehow telling Dudley about their sister Gwen’s boys in summer camp near Wiscasset and the caretaker’s repaving the drive seemed silly in comparison to leprosy-ridden villages, river crossings on goatskin boats, and avalanches sweeping thousands of feet down the mountain and across a two-mile-wide glacier. Even though he had resented Dudley’s sudden and prolonged absence, Clifford had had to admit,
What a hell of an adventure he’s on.

Then in early July, Clifford had received news that one of Dudley’s teammates was close to death. Death! They weren’t even on the mountain yet! Clifford had tried to contact the US consulate in Calcutta, but he’d gotten nowhere. He supposed no news was good news, but how could a boy die at base camp? Didn’t they have a doctor on board? To make matters worse, just last week Clifford had received an odd call from Dudley’s secretary, Henry Meyer, and he couldn’t get it off his mind. Meyer had received a letter from Dudley warning him not to let anyone have access to the film he had shot on the expedition, “not the leader of the expedition or any member of it.” Meyer had quoted the letter over the phone. It was rare for Dudley to speak so vehemently, and Clifford did not at all like imagining what had provoked it.

His film? Why on earth
, Clifford wondered,
is he worried about his film? First one of his teammates nearly dies of pneumonia and now he’s worried about being robbed or swindled by his own teammates?

Clifford stopped to look east across the moon-drenched Atlantic. Dudley’s letters had become increasingly—well, almost paranoid, as if he didn’t trust the men with whom he was climbing a mountain many considered unconquerable. For the thousandth time Clifford wished he had objected more strenuously to his brother’s insanely dangerous adventure. He also wished he had insisted on meeting this Fritz Wiessner before the expedition. Clifford didn’t even know the man to whom he had entrusted his brother’s life. And now, with things apparently disintegrating, Clifford was powerless to help. He did not like the feeling.

Clifford remembered that Dudley had stayed on in Europe after the war in order to help gain his brother’s freedom from the German prisoner-of-war camp that held him. Dudley had spent months writing letters to the American field offices, imploring any officials he could think of for help, and cabling the family back in Omaha and Maine every day with updates. Clifford wondered now if he had ever truly thanked his brother for his efforts, and worried that he hadn’t.

He walked to the edge of the porch and looked out over Penobscot Bay and the Atlantic Ocean beyond it, thinking,
What the devil is going on over there?

S
TILL FARTHER
away, Gwen Wolfe Sharpe sat in Minden, Nevada, looking out over her new husband’s ranch in the hot Great Basin desert.

She and Dudley had always exchanged a lot of letters and postcards, and she cherished a stack of them she’d received from the front lines in the war and now from his adventure to the Himalayas. But recently there had been an odd and unsettling silence. Cliff had explained how difficult it was to send and receive mail, and yet this absolute lack of communication was very troubling. They had always had a connection, even through the war; this void was painful.

Thankfully her boys, Dudley and Paul, were in summer camp in Maine, so she didn’t have to constantly answer their questions about whether another postcard had arrived from Uncle Dudley with a colorful foreign stamp for them to fight over. Today’s mail had again brought nothing. Maybe tomorrow she’d go into Carson City and check at the big post office and see if they had anything.

Looking out beyond the dry sagebrush, she saw the first glint of the moon rising over the distant Sierra Nevada. She thought of her brother, half a world away, on a peak two or three times as big as the ones on her horizon, and she could only close her eyes and say a prayer for his safety.

Come home to us, dear Dud, come home.