The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (23 page)

B
ELOW HIM,
Jack and Fritz anxiously watched for any sign that Dudley and the four Sherpas were finally on their way down. But repeatedly, they saw the motion of only three men climbing and descending between Camps VI and VII. What did it mean?

“There are many possibilities…Maybe,” Fritz faltered, his words fading off. He had no answers but he repeatedly tried to convince Jack that there was “absolutely no reason to be worried.” Dudley and the Sherpas would be in base camp within days, he assured Jack. “Not to worry!”

But Jack did worry. Not only was the fate of one of their teammates increasingly dire, he also knew he would be the primary scapegoat for the team’s failure, “as obviously someone must [be].” But he had merely been following Tony’s orders to strip Camps II and IV. The descending Sherpas had been the ones to strip Camps VI and VII on their own, trying to save the team money. Still, Jack knew he had abandoned his post at Camp II. If he had still been there when the Sherpas descended with their huge loads, he could have easily ordered the supplies back up the mountain. Further adding to his sense of dread was that when the Sherpas finally reached base camp on the 23rd, he hadn’t directed any of them to return the equipment to the mountain. He knew he would most likely be blamed for that as well.

While they waited, Jack and Fritz talked about the expedition, the mountain and, mostly, their failure to climb it. They napped, took pictures of flowers at the base of the Southeast Ridge, and ate too much—there was plenty of food in base camp. On July 31 they finally saw Kikuli, Kitar, and Phinsoo leave the tent at Camp VI and head back up the mountain for Dudley. They breathed a small sigh of relief. It shouldn’t be long now before everyone was back in camp, they thought.

In Camp VI, Tsering also waited. Kikuli had told him to again have tea and food waiting for their return that afternoon. They would not take any sleeping bags or food with them to Camp VII because the plan was to get Wolfe Sahib and descend immediately. For two days, Tsering kept the tea warm and food ready, but no one returned. Afraid to cross the ice slope above camp alone, he called out for Kikuli, Kitar, and Phinsoo time and again, but no one answered. He searched the mountain for any sign of his friends. There was nothing. He waited, hoping and praying to Buddha. Finally, on August 2, after five days in the tent and sure that his friends could not have survived three days and nights without food or sleeping bags, he headed off the mountain for what he hoped would be the last time.

When he stumbled into base camp that afternoon and told his story, Jack and Fritz immediately ordered him to go back up; there was no one else. Tony and Tendrup had left, Jack had proven time and again he couldn’t make it much above Camp II, Fritz was exhausted, Pasang Lama had frostbitten feet, and Dawa was a “whispering dwarf.”

Tsering had, in all likelihood, just left three of his “brothers” on the mountain; their disappearance could only mean their deaths. He was physically exhausted, emotionally drained, and now terrified of the mountain spirits who had swallowed up four members of the team. But Jack would hear none of his “balking” and commanded him and the hoarse Dawa to go up and check out the slope under Camp I for any signs of life, or death, while he and Fritz continued to watch from base camp. The dejected and exhausted Sherpas once again left base camp and headed for the mountain.

Jack and Fritz, still watching through Dudley’s field glasses, had decided that if they didn’t see any movement from Camp VII by noon, Fritz would have no choice but to head back up the mountain and bring Dudley down himself. Noon came and went. Exhausted, still with only a rasp for a voice, and now worried that he could lose some of his toes to frostbite, Fritz started up the mountain the afternoon of August 3. Almost immediately, it felt like his breath stopped in his throat. While he had hoped to make Camp IV by nightfall, he was unable to get any higher than Camp II. Calling up the mountain in the still night air, he and the Sherpas heard nothing in return.

O
N THE MORNING
of August 5, another full week since Dudley had been seen alive, the weather began to deteriorate and the first real storm in weeks moved across the mountain. As the first light snow began falling, Fritz declared he was too weak and that he “must not jeopardize my last reserves for the rescue.” When the storm cleared days later, Tsering stood outside the tent and made one last call up the mountain.

Silence was the only response.

Finally on August 8, Fritz, Dawa, and Tsering descended the mountain for the last time.

How long Dudley lived at Camp VII will never be known, but perhaps one of the last things he heard was the faint, far-off sound of Tsering calling up the mountain. Whether Dudley was still alive to hear it or not, the strange and beautiful tongue of the Hindustani language floating up the slope and through his silent tent was the last voice heard on K2 the summer of 1939.

Heading home through the Suez Canal.
(Courtesy of the Cranmer Collection)

T
heir last day at base camp, while Fritz rested, Jack, Dawa, and Tsering made one last trip up the glacier and scoured the mountain with Dudley’s field glasses for any sign of an avalanche or fall. Again, there was no sign of disaster, just the endless miles of snow and rock around them. Jack bowed his head and for one of the few times in his life quietly sang a song. It was from a collection of Schumann’s
lieder
and it just seemed the right thing to do. He then turned and walked back to base camp. Behind him, the summit of K2 was bathed in the setting sun’s golden light.

The following day, August 9, Jack and Fritz, the last members of the 1939 expedition to leave, finally walked away from K2. As they neared the confluence of the Baltoro and Godwin–Austen glaciers at Concordia, ten miles from the mountain, Jack turned and looked back for the last time at what had become a malevolent presence on the horizon. He later wrote, “Bade the old devil adieu—it was dutifully shrouded in clouds befitting the fate of those remaining in its clutches.”

From the moment they left base camp, Jack and Fritz both began preparing their versions of what had happened and why they had left four of their men on the mountain. While they were cordial to one another on the long trek home, each later accused the other of expressing a guilty anguish. Jack said Fritz broke into his tent at base camp to read his journal and that once on the trek he kept asking Jack, “What are we going to say? How can we explain it?” Fritz said that when he repeatedly asked Jack why the camps had been stripped, Jack cried in anguish, “Stop it! Stop it! We have talked long enough.” Fritz also suggested that Jack had removed the sleeping bags from the camps so that he could take one home and use it as a ploy with women.

Through all of the various accusations which were later leveled, what is clear from the trek out was that Fritz was in appalling condition, semi-coherent, and suffering fainting spells and fatigue so extreme that he was forced to curl up on the rocks and take naps along the way. Jack again stepped up as nursemaid, preparing him meals and often literally holding his hand lest he fall to the ground.

Interestingly, in Jack’s diary covering the twenty days from Concordia to Srinagar, he never mentions the tragedy or the men they left behind. Instead he gives great detail of every sumptuous meal he and Fritz ate, including a twelve-egg omelet (while also noting that Fritz was worried that the Sherpas, whose rations had been cut for the trek out, would complain to the Himalayan Club), the joy of smelling grass and flowers again after nearly three months on ice and rock, and the petty spats between him and Fritz.

Fritz’s diary ends on August 7, the day he called off the rescue attempt and descended to base camp for the last time. His only mention of the long trek out was years later, to interviewers and in notes to the authors of his planned, but never completed, biography. In these instances, Fritz spoke mainly of Jack and his panic, suggesting that Jack had cared for him “like a baby” because he was afraid of what Fritz would tell the world of Jack’s actions and inactions on the mountain.

They reached Shigar, the first village with a telegraph station, on August 18 and sent word to Tony Cromwell, who awaited them in Srinagar, and the American Alpine Club in New York. Dudley Wolfe and three Sherpas were dead.

As they approached Srinagar in late August, before time and circumstance had revised their stories, Fritz and Jack wrote their official expedition report for the American Alpine Club. In it they carefully detailed the weather, the team’s movement up the mountain, when and where the camps were established, the summit attempt, the descent, the discovery of the deserted Camp VII, and Fritz’s retreat down through the stripped camps to base. Of the three-and-a-half-page report, nearly two of the single-spaced, typewritten pages detail Fritz’s bid for the summit—the route, the rocks, the overhanging serac, and what he called “the greatest mistake I could have made” in turning around when Pasang refused to climb through the night; it didn’t mention any of the problems or the final tragedy. Although Jack thought Fritz had “padded the story to his own fancy,” all in all it was a very dry, very thin telling of the expedition’s two months on the mountain. Jack and Fritz worked on several revisions before they considered the account finished.

Then Tony Cromwell appeared and all hell broke loose.

When Tony and Joe Trench had left base camp on July 25 and started their long walk out, Tony was still smarting from his last encounter with Fritz and anxious about his own decision to strip Camps II and IV. He knew that it would be Fritz’s focus of attack in explaining why he had failed to make the summit, and although Tony had had nothing to do with the Sherpas’ decision to clear Camps VI and VII, the fact was he had taken it upon himself to order the lower camps stripped. When he and Joe caught up with Chap and George outside Askole on July 30, they had already rewoven their story. In their version, Fritz was blinkered by summit fever, had refused to bring a hobbled Dudley Wolfe down, and had ordered the Sherpas to rescue him, a rescue for which they were woefully untrained. Most remarkably, in Tony’s version of events, it was Jack (rather than himself) who had given the order to strip all the camps. Both George Sheldon and Chap Cranmer wrote in their journals that Tony had told them that “Jack, out of turn,” had cleared the camps. George summed up the tragedy, mincing few words: “The blame, as has been said before, lies mostly with Fritz. The great K2 expedition is over and they have lost four men. Fine work.”

Tony stayed in Srinagar a month after leaving base camp, anxious to see Fritz and find out what had happened. He learned the worst on August 19 when Fritz’s telegram arrived from Shigar: four men were dead. Reeling from the news and anxious about how they would handle the crisis, Tony all but ran to meet Fritz and Jack as they approached Srinagar on the 27th. At first relieved to finally see them, Tony then read a draft of Fritz and Jack’s expedition report and exploded, calling it a disgraceful cover-up. Further, he charged that Fritz was fully responsible for the deaths of Dudley Wolfe as well as the three Sherpas, because a rescue of that caliber, without sahibs to assist, was something for which the three Sherpas were clearly not trained.

Jack, always hoping to avoid a confrontation, tried to calm the two warring men, but Tony would not be mollified. He turned on his heel and stormed ahead into Srinagar. Once there, he sat down to write his version of the tragedy to Joel Fisher at the American Alpine Club in New York. Like Fritz and Jack’s report, Tony’s quickly detailed the weather and camps, but unlike what he told Chap and George, his written report offered no blame or speculation about the leadership or the stripped camps. Tony’s report also stated that Fritz, Dudley, and Pasang’s near-fatal fall occurred on July 17 during ascent, not on July 22 during descent, and that, after the fall, Dudley was too ill to leave the tents at Camp VIII during the week that Fritz and Pasang went for the summit.

Presumably gleaned from Pasang Lama, Tony’s timeline of the accident and Dudley’s subsequent illness offer a glimpse into an alternative scenario. Perhaps the fall had happened before Fritz went for the summit, not after he descended, and Dudley was left in Camp VIII because he was incapacitated. If true, Fritz’s decision to leave Dudley sick, possibly injured, and alone while he went for the summit was certainly one he would have had a difficult time defending. It’s interesting to note that in two major accounts in which Fritz detailed the expedition, he never mentioned the fall. The first was his own original report written with Jack in Srinagar;
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the second was a 1969 interview for
Ascent
. Additionally, when Fritz later read Tony’s report in New York, he made angry notes in the margin objecting to and correcting many of Tony’s assertions, but he made no notes next to Tony’s statement that the fall occurred on July 17, versus July 22, his own claimed date. The fact that there are two different timelines for the fall indicates, more than anything, that Fritz’s memory of what and exactly when things occurred was severely compromised during his final days on the mountain.

Tony didn’t stop with his formal report. He wrote a letter to Fisher with his more personal assessment of the failed expedition, and urged Joe Trench, who was still in Srinagar, to do the same. While Trench’s letter was detailed and without any overt accusation, he did cite three failures by Wiessner which he felt contributed to the eventual tragedy. First, because Wiessner was “not very coherent” when he reached base camp on July 24 and as “he kept no diary,”
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those in base camp were unclear as to where and when Dudley had been left and in what condition. Second, Wiessner’s order to send up three Sherpas to “fetch Wolfe” was “hardly right” because the Sherpas were only high-altitude porters and not trained guides prepared for such a difficult mission. Finally, Trench wrote that if Wiessner had deferred his summit attempt until Camp VIII was fully stocked, “the lives of four first class fellows would not have been needlessly wasted.”

Without explaining why, the American consul in Calcutta, Edward Groth, dismissed Trench’s report out of hand, deeming it “superficial” to the point of having no credibility. Meanwhile, Tony Cromwell’s letter was a scathing, if not libelous, attack in which he accused Fritz of murder. The letter was evidently so incendiary and vindictive that Groth and the British Resident in Kashmir, Lt. Col. D. M. S. Fraser, questioned Cromwell’s motives more than the actions of the accused team leader.
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Finally, Lt. Gen. Sir Roger C. Wilson, the president of the Himalayan Club in Srinagar, wrote his own summary, stating that the expedition was “remarkable for the antagonism which developed between the members. Squabbles within parties are not unknown, indeed they are incidental to a prolonged stay at high altitudes, but nothing approaching this one in intensity has ever come to notice. It divided the expedition into hostile factions and even endured after the tragedy, for which, incidentally, it was mainly responsible.” Wilson’s report was sent to the secretary of state in Washington DC and was filed in the National Archives, but like so many other potentially damaging documents, it disappeared from the American Alpine Club archives.

Whichever account was closest to the truth, the argument was lost in the firestorm that followed; the war had begun, both between the expedition members and out in the world. On September 1, Germany’s Blitzkrieg against Poland began and on September 3, after Hitler ignored an ultimatum to remove his forces, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

While the European powers readied for World War II, the remnants of the 1939 expedition found themselves adrift halfway around the world.

B
ACK IN
N
EW
Y
ORK
, from the moment the American Alpine Club received word that four men on the team had perished, one of them Dudley Wolfe, club officials began circling the wagons; they knew they had a crisis of potentially devastating proportions on their hands. Not only had America suffered its second death in the Himalayas in only ten years,
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but the fatality was a man from one of the country’s oldest and wealthiest families, a family that would certainly demand answers. Further, the expedition had been led by a man whom many of the club’s most august members had refused to join, reportedly because of his volatile temper and autocratic leadership style.

Having received Tony Cromwell’s report in late August, and not knowing of the internecine battles brewing on the expedition, the club decided to distribute the account to its membership. Fritz was still in India but he was already under attack.

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N
S
EPTEMBER
4, Groth, the US consul, traveled to Srinagar to interview Fritz Wiessner and Jack Durrance. For seven hours he spoke to the men separately and together about what had happened on the expedition. While Tony and Joe were blaming Fritz and Jack, and Fritz and Jack had obliquely accused Tendrup for starting the rumor that the summit team was dead, once they were faced with Groth’s questions about what went wrong, Dudley Wolfe was suddenly no longer the victim. He became their culprit.

In Groth’s report, perhaps one of the least self-serving (if a bit xenophobic) of the many reports to follow, he firmly attributed the expedition’s overall failure to a “clash of temperaments” due in large part to Fritz’s “German bluntness…like every German, he is very forceful in giving commands and totally unaware that the abrupt, blunt manner in which the order may have been given might have wounded the feelings of his associates, who in this instance, being Americans, naturally had a different attitude and outlook in matters of this sort.” He also examined the financial inequity as a source of conflict: “the general feeling of several of the expedition members was that, as they had borne their share of the expenses and had contributed liberally to the expenses of one or two members unable to pay the entire cost out of their own pockets, they were entitled to have just as much to say about the running of the expedition as the leader.” As Jack was the only one who joined at a discounted rate, it would seem that this came from Fritz and was a direct criticism of Dudley Wolfe, a man he called his “brave comrade.” Or perhaps it did come from Jack, and was an indication of his resentment and guilt at having been financially sponsored by a man he had then been unwilling or unable to rescue.