The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (29 page)

^*
Like a lot of the original documentation from the expedition and ensuing inquiry, Cromwell’s letter either disappeared or was destroyed; either way, it has not been seen publicly for over seventy years.

^*
The first death was E. Francis Farmer, a businessman from Manhattan with no mountain experience who nonetheless set out in 1929 to explore the foothills of Kangchenjunga, the world’s third highest mountain and one of its deadliest. He was last spotted by his porters on or near the summit, but he never returned. If he had reached the top and made it back alive, his feat would have changed the course of Himalayan climbing and forever set the standard for ascending an 8,000-meter peak, as he did it alone and without oxygen or support of any kind. It would be another fifty years before a similar feat was recorded at that height in the Himalayas.

^*
Fritz Wiessner’s expedition log.

^*
Personal correspondence from Reid to Weissner, 1938.

^*
These and other depositions taken by Clifford Smith and Herbert Connell between October 1939 and February 1940 are quoted verbatim.

^*
It was another peculiar statement, given that food was not the reason for descending nor did it have any bearing on why he left Dudley at Camp VII. But Smith had no way of knowing the intricacies of the expedition or of Wiessner’s fateful descent.

^*
While the last rolls of film that Dudley shot disappeared, several shot previously at the lower camps had been taken down the mountain and sent home with the mail runners.

^*
In addition to the wax, the army ordered those same 30,000 troops 150,000 pairs of skis and 200,000 pairs of boots.

^*
Clifford Smith died in 1964 and so he never learned that Wiessner assumed ownership of Dudley’s prized films. In addition, there are several expedition photographs which have Wiessner credited as the photographer, many of them high on the mountain. While he may indeed have taken the images, there is no record of his ever having operated a camera during the expedition or, in fact, in his entire life. Further, there seems to have been an agreement among the surviving team members to share the expedition’s best photos—including Dudley’s—because each of the Cromwell, Durrance, Sheldon, and Cranmer collections all contain photos in which the owner/photographer appears in one of “his” own photos, indicating that someone else took the image. Several of these include photos in which Sheldon, Durrance, and Cranmer all appear; these were most probably taken by Dudley Wolfe, including the one on the cover of this book.

^*
Chap Cranmer’s family, grateful to Jack for having saved their son’s life, paid for his medical education at the Waring Institute at the University of Colorado in Denver.

^*
Gilkey, a handsome, fun-loving member of Charlie’s 1953 K2 team, had suddenly been stricken with phlebitis, or blood clots, high on the mountain. A potentially fatal diagnosis at sea level, at 26,000 feet they are a death sentence. Still, Charlie and the team rallied to carry Gilkey down on an improvised stretcher. As they navigated a steep, icy slope below Camp VIII (very close to where Dudley, Fritz, and Pasang had fallen), one of the men slipped, pulling the entire party off their feet. In one of Himalayan climbing’s most heroic and miraculous moments, Pete Schoening saw what was happening below him and was able to dig his ice axe into a rock before the weight of five men and a gurney came onto the rope at his waist. Incredibly, he held on, and the rope didn’t break. Each man survived, although some, including Charlie, were severely injured. As they picked themselves up, Gilkey in the stretcher was left anchored on the slope while the other men quickly put up a couple of tents to tend to the injured. When they went back to the slope for Gilkey, he was gone, most likely swept off the slope by an avalanche. As the men descended the mountain in the morning, they climbed down through a bloodstained trail—so horrific a scene many had no memory of it until years later. Before they left base camp, they erected a stone monument to Art. The Gilkey Memorial stands to this day and now bears the names of seventy-eight other fallen climbers.

^*
As of the end of the 2009 climbing season in mid-August, the number of climbers who lost their lives on K2 stood at seventy-eight.