The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (20 page)

With little else to go on but the silence, the avalanche slope, and his own fears of the mountain spirits, Tendrup decided that the three above them must have perished. Returning to Camp VII, he told Kitar and Phinsoo of his fears that the sahibs above were dead. They talked at length, trading their theories and fears, and kept coming back to one undeniable truth: they hadn’t seen nor heard from any one of the three in nearly a week. Surely something must have happened. What could they do? They were too afraid to stay here, particularly if the mountain spirits had already been angered by the sahibs—they could be next. There was nothing left to do but descend, and because the sahibs had told them repeatedly how valuable the sleeping bags were, they knew they had better take them and the larger food tins with them as Kikuli, Dawa, and Doctor Sahib had done further down.

They turned and started off the mountain, clearing anything of value out of Camp VII and then Camp VI further beneath it.

Below Dudley at Camp VIII, the mountain was now bare and soon to be empty.

A
T THAT MOMENT
, Fritz stared up a ramp of unstable ice which would later come to be known as the Bottleneck, a steep avalanche gully of loose rock and frozen scree. Beyond it was a 200-foot vertical wall of ice over which a gigantic overhanging bulge of ice, or serac, loomed. To Fritz, the bulging ice looked too fragile and avalanche-prone to traverse under.
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He hated the perilous exposure they would endure climbing beneath it, and decided that, rather than flirt with the chance of a chunk of ice breaking off the serac and flooding down through the gully, he would traverse around the most dangerous section and climb on a surface where he felt more in control: rock. After explaining the move to Pasang, Fritz and the Sherpa carefully removed their crampons so that they’d have better traction on the rock and tied them to Pasang’s pack. Then, taking off his gloves (at close to 27,000 feet, an amazing demonstration of fortitude) in order to get a better feel of the rock beneath his fingers, Fritz led Pasang up the rock face in what was undoubtedly the highest technical rock climb in history, at an altitude never before reached on K2. It took hours, but the men did it, exhausted and elated to have that section behind them.

Fritz looked toward the summit with growing excitement. It was only a few hundred vertical feet above them.
It is mine.
The summit of K2. After generations of explorers who had only been able to guess what the mountain felt and looked like at this height, here he was. As he had told Charlie Houston before he left, he was about to make history and be made for life.

In his elation he hadn’t heard troubling sounds behind him. Pasang was muttering to himself. Then the words became chanting prayers to Buddha. Suddenly the rope at Fritz’s waist went taut. Carefully he turned and looked down to Pasang, who stood there slowly shaking his head no. While Fritz later claimed that Pasang had refused to go on out of fear of mountain spirits, it was equally plausible that his fear was more pedestrian. After spending most of the day standing stock still while belaying Fritz at 27,000 feet, Pasang’s feet were probably in danger of severe frostbite. His cheap-issue Sherpa boots were not designed for subzero temperatures and Pasang might not have been willing to risk his future as a mountain guide for Fritz’s glory on the summit. Besides, he believed—with very good reason—that they would not survive a night exposed to the elements on the summit ridge of K2. As the mountain’s subsequent history eventually confirmed, it is the deadliest of the 8,000-meter mountains on descent, proving that Pasang’s fears were well founded.

Fritz looked at the Sherpa in disbelief, and with rising anger.
We are almost there!
he insisted. He could almost see the summit from where they stood. It was 6 p.m. His plan was to climb through the night, the half moon providing enough refracted light off the slopes to adequately see, reach the summit before midnight then head back down, returning to their tent by daybreak. Without proper food and hydration, warmth, and rest, a nighttime summit bid at those altitudes is wildly risky, but to Fritz, whose judgment was probably compromised after several days above 26,000 feet, it made perfect sense.
It’s more dangerous to climb down at night than it is up!
he urged Pasang.
We’ll be safer climbing the easier snow fields to the summit rather than descending that rock wall at night!

No
, Pasang said firmly.
No
. He began to untie the safety rope that connected him to Fritz so that he could start down alone, if necessary. He had had enough.

Fritz’s only options were to continue on alone in the dark or to turn his back on his dream and follow Pasang down. Fritz looked up at the mountain.
It is right there
. The pull of the summit was physical, painful. But he knew he couldn’t, at least he shouldn’t, try it on his own. This was not a mountain to climb alone, in the dark, at 28,000 feet. He also felt a flicker of dread of what the climbing community would make of his abandoning his climbing partner. Years later he would tell his biographer, “People would see me as ‘that lousy damned Nazi German who must be crucified’ if I had left Pasang.” Fritz decided he had no choice but to follow Pasang down.

Okay, Pasang, okay. Don’t untie the rope. I’m coming.

As they rappelled each other back down the rock face, the rope became caught on their two pairs of crampons tied to the Sherpa’s pack. In his desire to get off the cliff face before the sun disappeared behind Chogolisa to the west and the temperature dropped dramatically, Pasang yanked at the rope to free it. Fritz was above and saw what was about to happen but, before he could speak, Pasang gave the rope a final, savage tug and the two men watched as their crampons went spinning off into the void beneath them and disappeared down the south face of K2.

Fritz watched them go with a sick sinking in his stomach. Climbing rock walls without crampons was one thing, but climbing across the windswept ice fields which were above them, and then descending back down without them, was unthinkable.
But maybe
, Fritz quickly reasoned with his take-charge thinking,
I could cut steps through the worst of the exposure. I’ve cut hundreds, maybe thousands of steps below me, why couldn’t I cut a few more dozen above me? Besides, we are through the worst of it. It’s merely a snow slope from here.

With that, he had a plan. He continued down behind Pasang, organizing his thoughts and planning for his summit assault in the morning. He had kept his eye on the overhanging serac all day and had seen nothing discharge down the ice gully. Because its smooth surface was far easier than the technical rock wall they had climbed this morning, he decided that that would be their route. Starting early and getting onto the final summit cone around sunrise, they would reach the summit itself before noon and could get back to their high camp that afternoon, possibly even all the way down to Camp VIII. The plan cheered him up. But when they finally regained their tent at Camp IX it was 2:30 in the morning; they hadn’t eaten or drunk a drop for hours; melting snow and making food and tea to replenish and rehydrate would take most of the remaining night. Given that most summit assaults begin hours before sunrise in order to make it back to camp before nightfall the following day, Fritz decided they would take a rest day and proceed for the summit the morning after that.

On July 20, as Jack was luxuriating in his birthday bath far below them, Fritz and Pasang awoke around ten o’clock to a beautiful, cloudless, windless day. Fritz removed his clothes and lay naked in the door of the tent, soaking in the warmth and exotic luxury of sun on his bare skin. Pasang lay next to him. They had reason to celebrate and bask in the warmth. They had climbed to within 800 feet of the summit. They had nearly reached the top of K2 without support or oxygen; it would be forty years before anyone matched that feat.
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And they had done all of this on what many already considered to be the world’s hardest mountain. Even though the summit had eluded them so far, they were already victors and they had every reason to savor their success. And, they would try again tomorrow.

While it was undoubtedly a sumptuous sun bath, it also was a potentially expensive one in terms of Fritz’s and Pasang’s strength. The power of the sun’s rays in the thinner atmosphere at 27,000 feet, to say nothing of the debilitating effects of altitude, can strip a body of energy. Fritz and Pasang, after eight weeks of exhausting work on the mountain, the last few days of which was at altitudes only reached previously with bottled oxygen, must have already been on borrowed energy and time. In hindsight, their sun bath may have been their undoing.

B
ELOW, AT
C
AMP
VIII, Dudley licked at a tiny pool of water in a flap of the tent. He had run out of matches the day before and, although he had tried to melt enough snow to supply him for another day or two, he’d melted only a few cups before the last match was gone. Luckily, the weather had held so he had been able to melt snow in the sun, but at 26,000 feet the snow didn’t have enough moisture in it to provide more than a couple of tablespoons at a time. Still, it was liquid and he lapped at it greedily, trying to hold it in his mouth and wet his lips with it before swallowing.

He’d been in this camp seven days, five of them waiting for Fritz to return or for help to come from below so he could try the overhanging crevasse again. He had fought hard for this mountain and gotten further than almost anyone else. To have his daring adventure come down to such an ignominious end insulted everything he’d ever done in his life. In the face of the younger men’s ridicule, he had not given up. He knew he wasn’t the best climber, or the most agile, or the most gifted. But he’d made it this far.

He had thought about making another go at the crevasse alone; the snow had most likely settled and crusted over, and with his crampons he might be able to just “walk” up the wall. But as much as he wanted to get moving and make a stab at the summit, somehow he just couldn’t do it. Not alone. Besides, all of the inaction had caused the frostbite on his feet to get worse and he had had to spend most of his days rubbing circulation back into his painful toes. Looking toward the slope above him for the thousandth time, he searched for signs of Fritz and Pasang, wondering where in hell they’d gone and what he would do if they never returned. As another night fell, Dudley lay in his sleeping bag with the half moon overhead. His feet throbbed; hunger and thirst gnawed at his stomach. Finally he fell asleep.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Fritz and Pasang arose before dawn. After a quick breakfast, they suited up and started out toward the gully below the serac, but soon realized the warm sun the day before had melted the surface snow, which had then frozen overnight into a thick sheet of ice. Fritz looked at the 1,500 feet of mountain above him, calculating that he would need to cut nearly four hundred steps. It simply wasn’t possible. He didn’t have the strength or the time for such an effort. They would have to descend to Camp VIII and “expropriate”
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Dudley’s crampons—the only pair left high on the mountain—or get a pair from the reinforcements coming from below. Reluctantly and with rising irritation that once again Jack and the Sherpas were nowhere in sight, the following morning Fritz descended with Pasang to Camp VIII. It was July 22.

Paul Petzoldt’s 1938 shot of the infamous ice slope above Camp VI.
(Photo by Paul Petzoldt, courtesy of the Houston-NOLS Archives)

F
ritz began what he thought would be a short descent to Camp VIII for food and crampons “from the expected support party”
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to traverse the ice gully and slopes above Camp IX. Knowing that reserve sleeping bags had been stocked at Camp VIII, he left his own at Camp IX to reduce his load. He had to conserve his energy for another summit attack, and every ounce counted.

As they began their descent on the relatively easy slope, Pasang lost his footing and started sliding toward the cliff edge of the south face. Fritz moved quickly and dug his ice axe into the slope before the rope between them pulled him right off the mountain after Pasang. Pasang was clearly finished. Dizzy and disoriented from the five days above 26,000 feet, the Sherpa was so weak that his condition was becoming a critical hazard.

As every Himalayan climber soon learns, going down is deadlier than going up because gravity is working perversely against you. When you slip on the way up, you merely fall into the slope at your face. When you slip on descent you fall into the abyss at your feet. Still, Fritz had no other options for a climbing partner with whom to attack the summit, unless one had arrived at Camp VIII. If not, Pasang would have to rest at Camp VIII and be ready for another summit bid.

Instead of provisions and fresh Sherpas awaiting them at VIII, they saw a desolate tent, somewhat collapsed after nearly a week of wind battering it, its front enclosure loose and blowing in the wind. It looked empty but Fritz called ahead and was surprised to see the tent move and a figure slowly crawl out.

It was Dudley. He had spent another five days alone on the mountain, this time at 25,300 feet. He was exhausted, dehydrated, malnourished, and had badly swollen and frostbitten feet. He struggled to get out of the tent and then to his feet to greet them. He had run out of matches two days before and was reduced to melting handfuls of snow in small folds of the tent. He had had no cooked food and the food he did have was dried and heavily salted, which further stripped him of liquids: canned ham and pemmican, Ry Krisp crackers, cheese, dried peaches, dried apricots, and raisins. His stores of dried vegetables, cereals, cocoa, macaroni, tea, bouillon, soup cubes, and rice had gone untouched. Unwilling and unable to descend the treacherous slopes below him alone, he had sat vigil waiting for men and supplies which never came. While weak, he was still functioning and mentally alert enough to be alarmed and angry that no one had come from below. Whether or not he still thought the summit was in his grasp will never be known, but after his two months on the mountain, it’s hard to imagine that his thoughts were on anything but descent, safety, and home, and not on climbing slopes and navigating crevasses which had already defeated him or of more nights spent trying to sleep in the suffocating air.

Fritz was irate. He felt as if he had been close enough to the summit to see the view from the top. He had solved the last riddle of this confounding mountain that had eluded men for generations, and it was now his for the taking. Yet instead of climbing toward it, he had to walk further away. Descending to Camp VIII had been frustrating enough; now they would have to go even further, to Camp VII, hoping that it still had men and supplies in it, although he was beginning to doubt it did.
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Something had gone seriously wrong on the mountain below him. He didn’t know what had happened to Jack, Kikuli, and the others, but if they hadn’t resupplied Camp VIII as instructed, there was every possibility Camp VII was also empty. The insubordination of his team was more than he could comprehend.

With a handful of matches given to him by Pasang, Dudley was finally able to prepare a hot meal and quickly handed out soup and crackers to the two men. Then he packed up his sleeping bag, journal, and camera, and prepared for the painful descent on his blistered feet.

Here, Dudley’s decision to descend to Camp VII deserves examination. Fritz later testified that Dudley was “in great shape,” so much so that he “insisted” on joining Fritz on a final summit bid, and that he descended to Camp VII only to help bring up supplies for that bid. The distance between the camps was only 600 vertical feet—a distance covered in hours, not days. If he were bent on going for the summit, surely it would have been easier for Dudley to wait at Camp VIII while Fritz and Pasang hopped down to Camp VII, grabbed some food and fuel for a summit bid, and reascended.

But Dudley didn’t wait at Camp VIII, and, because he took his sleeping bag, air mattress, journal, and camera with him, it seems likely that his intent was to continue all the way to base camp.

Another curiosity is Fritz’s decision not to grab one of the extra sleeping bags which had been stocked at Camp VIII. A climber’s bag is one of his few securities on a mountain; for Fritz, who had left his at Camp IX, to have one available at Camp VIII and not utilize it was perhaps an indication of his reduced mental capacity after so many days near 27,000 feet, particularly since he was already worried that Camp VII might be empty.

Regardless of hindsight logic, three men with only two sleeping bags decided to head down the mountain on the afternoon of July 22. Tying the three of them together on a rope, Wiessner started to inch them down the slope. While it is customary for the strongest climber to take up the rear on descent in order to arrest any falls on the rope below him, Fritz didn’t trust Pasang to find the route down the tricky, steep slope; plus, there was nobody better at discerning a mountain’s mysteries than Fritz. Even though Pasang was severely depleted by that time, Fritz went first, with Dudley in the middle and Pasang in the rear, the most powerful position in the three-man team. Dudley was presumably wearing the only pair of crampons between the three men, and with the tricouni nails in both Fritz’s and Pasang’s boots worn down after weeks on the mountain, Fritz was forced to cut steps for purchase on the slick incline. Bending forward, he cut into the ice with quick, sharp bites of the axe as he moved laboriously down the slope.

Above him, Dudley was moving even more slowly. Between his seven weeks on the mountain, the last week in a tent at nearly 26,000 feet, and his depleted physical strength, he wasn’t taking any chances. As he inched along, he looked down a slope so steep he couldn’t see where it ended beneath him. It was like climbing down the side of a roller coaster. If he could have inched down on his rear end with his crampons digging into the ice for purchase, he would have.

Below him, Fritz was annoyed. He wanted to get to Camp VII and crawl into a sleeping bag and rest. After he cut the third step and leaned toward where he would cut the fourth, something happened which caused Fritz to lose his footing and soon all three men were sliding down the slope out of control.

Re-creating what actually happened in the accident is impossible, but it’s not hard to imagine how frustrated Fritz was or how desperate he must have been to lay his head down and sleep. He had been higher on a Himalayan peak and for longer than any man in history, most of the time breaking trail and anchoring the safety rope to the rock and ice walls on the route. Perhaps the rope around his body tightened between him and Dudley and he tugged it out of impatience. Or, perhaps Dudley became tangled with the rope, stepping on it and causing it to pull at Fritz’s waist. Or, perhaps Fritz simply fell forward as he leaned over to cut the next step, and Dudley and Pasang in their diminished states were unable to properly belay him.

No matter how it happened, something pulled Dudley off the mountain so strongly that he somersaulted over Fritz and began careening down the precipitous slope, pulling Pasang and then Fritz after him. Soon all three were tumbling down the icy grade, the rope playing out and then catching between them as their bodies fell. Fritz kicked his boots into the slope trying to gain purchase in the ice as the men slid with ever-increasing speed, bouncing against the rocks as they plummeted. After several wild swings of his heavy ice axe, which glanced off the frozen slope as if it were a baseball bat, Fritz finally felt the rope catch and braced himself as the other two men’s weight became taut on the rope at his waist. They all stopped, less than 200 feet from a sheer drop-off to the Godwin–Austen Glacier 9,000 feet below. While Fritz later said he was finally able to sink his axe far enough into the ice to hold the three men, Pasang reported that the rope had caught on a rock. Either way, their fall had been arrested and they were alive, if bruised and badly shaken by their close call. Looking down, Fritz could see that Pasang had suffered some sort of injury to his back or possibly his kidneys, while Dudley’s rucksack (with his sleeping bag, air mattress, and one of his cameras) tumbled down the slope and disappeared into oblivion.

After picking up the pieces and dusting themselves off, the three men limped carefully down to Camp VII, only a few hundred feet below them. But instead of men and supplies, they found the camp not only empty but stripped; its tents had been left open to the wind and were half-filled with snow, food and matches were scattered on the slope, and, most critically, no one was in sight whose crampons Fritz could use for his summit bid.

The three men stood staring at the ruined camp, dumbstruck.

What in hell happened here?
Fritz wondered. While it was one thing for Jack and Kikuli not to have reached Camp VIII, for them to have evacuated Camp VII was an outrage. He had left exact orders detailing who was to bring what supplies and when, and he was infuriated that his demands had been ignored. He had reprimanded Tony and Jack several times before and now to be so utterly disregarded was unthinkable. Had he and Dudley been sabotaged by the Sherpas, even though Kitar and Tendrup had been so “cheerful” the last time he had seen them at Camp VIII? Fritz stomped about the camp, his temper, anguish, and exhaustion boiling over in equal measure. His own team had “sacrificed this great goal,”
his
great goal. Not only had they been abandoned, but they had been left without spare sleeping bags and air mattresses high on K2. Standing on the edge of the mountain in the fading light, after his white rage finally passed, Fritz had one overriding thought:
What the hell am I going to do now?

As Pasang gathered some of the scattered food and prepared a small meal, Fritz and Dudley re-erected the most usable tent. When it was finally standing, the three crawled into it for the night.

Fritz wasn’t exactly clear on what had happened on the slope above, or why they all fell, but he knew that they had almost disappeared down a 9,000-foot face. Did he have the strength for another close call? Could he stop all three of them again if there were a next time? Could he take that chance? The nails on his boots were almost butter-smooth by now—he hadn’t been able to sharpen them in over a week. Also, his six days above 26,000 feet had cost him more in terms of his physical strength than he’d thought. He was exhausted. The idea of descending, with the summit so close, infuriated him. However, without crampons and a climbing partner, it was impossible to even consider another try. He needed to replace Pasang, but there were no Sherpas in sight. There was only Dudley and his one pair of crampons.

For nearly ten hours the three sat upright huddled beneath Pasang’s thin sleeping bag while the frigid cold bore into their bones through the tent floor. With sleep impossible, Fritz and Dudley talked through the night, Fritz bitterly accusing the men below of having stolen his summit out of jealousy and revenge, and declaring that Dudley, with his money to buy a team of lawyers, could have them all sued for stripping the camps, even put in jail for criminal negligence. It was the longest night of Fritz Wiessner’s life and one from which he felt he never truly recovered his strength. Years later, he would tell his son that that one night at Camp VII cost him more physically than anything else ever would in his life.

As they waited for the first light of morning, Wiessner thought of the descent ahead and knew that the worst of the steep and icy slopes was still below them: a treacherous 65-degree pitch with ice so smooth they called it blue. They’d have to traverse across it in order to avoid facing directly downhill, but that would only lengthen their descent. Even if Fritz were to wear Dudley’s crampons, there were few rocks to arrest a three-man tumble down the slope and none of them had the strength or skills to hold the weight and momentum of all three careening out of control down the mountain.

Whether Fritz accepted it or not as they sat upright that long night, perched on the edge of K2, his ability to get Dudley Wolfe down the mountain was gone. Their fall the day before had been devastating for Dudley; after two months on the mountain he was a frail shadow of the man who had boarded the
Biancamano
four months before. His somersault down the slope, losing his rucksack, and nearly falling off the east face cliffs, had taken the last of his already spent reserves. He was done.