The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (5 page)

Over twenty years before the famed Telepherique de l’Aiguille du Midi was built, enabling tourists, climbers, and skiers to ride up the side of the massive mountain, Dudley and his party climbed over 9,000 feet from Chamonix village to the Vallot hut on their skis. From there he performed an early and still rare ski traverse of Mont Blanc to the Mer de Glace. He also climbed rock faces on the Brevant and reached scores of summits in the western Pyrenees, the Alps—including Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn—and in the Bregaglia group of the Engadine along the Swiss–Italian border.

While skiing in the Tyrol above St. Anton in the Arlberg district of Austria in the spring of 1934, Wolfe watched as an attractive woman with a heroically female body—curvaceous, strong, and statuesque—slalomed down the slopes, effortlessly mastering the icy course. At the bottom, he watched as she tore off her ski hat, releasing a thick crop of short, dark curls, and smiled broadly at her companion. Inquiring, he was told her name was Alice Damrosch.

Alice Blaine Damrosch was born on May 18, 1892, the eldest daughter of the famed conductor of the New York Symphony, Walter Johannes Damrosch, and the granddaughter of James Gillespie Blaine, secretary of state under presidents Garfield and Harrison. The Damrosch dynasty, as one writer called it, included several generations of European musical heritage, and after Walter Damrosch and his brother Frank immigrated to America in 1871, they began building a musical tradition in their new country. Walter had four daughters, who grew up in a house where there was always a guest musician visiting, his cello leaning against the door frame or his sheet music on the piano.

Alice’s first marriage in 1914 to Hall Pleasants Pennington, whom the
New York Times
described as a man who “gardens,” ended almost before it began. The ceremony was on Lake Champlain in upstate New York, after which the newlyweds canoed off in a flurry of rose petals as musicians played on the shore. But that was evidently the end of the romance; early the next morning, Alice canoed alone back to where her family was staying on the lake and spent the rest of her honeymoon with them.

Alice went through romances quickly. No man, it seemed, quite lived up to her family’s artistic or intellectual standards. A man had to be someone and do something, and while her beaus entertained her in the short run, none seemed to measure up for the long haul. Pleasants was no different. While they stayed married for years, they remained childless and she lived more or less a single woman’s life, splitting her time between New York society and long vacations in Europe. When they finally divorced in the late 1920s, she escaped to the mountains of Austria, where she found a new life of hunting and skiing with a host of creative and accomplished friends. After killing her first ibex, she wrote to her family in New York, “The blood was so hot you could have boiled an egg in it!”

While children bored her and she never sought to have her own, Alice was a powerful presence whose nieces and nephews adored and feared her in often equal measure. She could be ruthless in her comments, cruelly pointing out if one had gained weight or had an unsightly blemish. After the mortified niece fled to her room sobbing, Alice would wave off her biting criticism with “Well, that’s the way I see it.” When she took her niece Lisa shopping for her first evening gown, what should have been a pleasant outing became an ordeal when Alice demanded, “Why can’t you stand up straight?” and made cutting remarks about the adolescent girl’s lingering baby fat. But Alice was also tough on herself and fanatical about her own appearance. Rising before dawn every morning of her summer visits to the family house in Bar Harbor, Maine, she would climb to the summits of nearby mountains in Acadia National Park before breakfast in order to stay in shape. In the 1930s, when she was well into her forties, she became one of the first women to ski the unrelenting ice wall of Tuckerman’s Ravine, a glacial cirque on Mount Washington’s southeast face in New Hampshire.

She was also a gracious hostess, inviting those same nieces to Austria for extended vacations, sitting for hours showing them the art of needlepoint, and teaching each of them how to ski, although the lessons were far from gentle. “That is a stupid way to ski! Bend your knees, for heaven’s sake!” she would yell down the slope. Still, her nieces looked forward to their visits. Her apartments in St. Anton and New York always had the best of everything. The bed linens were Egyptian cotton and professionally laundered so that the creases were crisp. The lavender soap was imported from England, the towels monogrammed, and always there were cut flowers in every room.

Part Jewish, Alice had an abiding hatred of the Nazis and their rapid encroachment on her beloved second home of Austria. Although deeply political and entirely outspoken, she would don her white gloves and society hat and play the role of pampered, ignorant American matron presenting herself at Third Reich military offices in order to gain the release of her detained Jewish friends, among them Hans Kraus, a famed orthopedic surgeon.
^*

In 1931, at the age of thirty-nine, she won a gold medal at the Parsenne Ski Derby at Davos, Switzerland. Three years later, while skiing above St. Anton in the spring of 1934, she met a gentle, soft-spoken, and earnest yachtsman and budding ski racer. Soon, the feisty divorcee and the understated bachelor realized they shared a deep passion for all things outdoors, not only skiing and touring but hunting as well. While Dudley lacked a profession, he nonetheless was a charming, generous man who didn’t throw his money around garishly, as so many wealthy Americans did, and she knew he loved her. She feared her family would take issue with his apparent idleness, but they took issue with everybody, and besides, she and Dudley would spend most of their year in Austria, thousands of miles away from her family’s critical eyes.

In late October 1934 Dudley and Alice cabled home to America: they had gotten married in Geneva and would be sailing to New York on the SS
Bremen
in early November for the obligatory celebrations. Alice was also organizing a fundraiser in New York in December for what would become America’s first women’s Olympic ski team, after which she and Dudley would return to Austria for her favorite season, Christmas. She loved him dearly, but her family, true to form, thought him a somewhat bland playboy. Hoping to soften at least one of her sisters’ edges, Dudley bought Anita Damrosch a Cartier gold watch. Whether or not it changed her opinion of her brother-in-law, she cherished the watch the rest of her life.

For the next three years, the couple criss-crossed the Atlantic, traveling between their homes in New York, Maine, and Austria. In Europe, Dudley bought a Buick Phaeton roadster, and the two toured the mountain towns and villages, stopping for the night only when they found inns which looked suitably quaint and clean. But it was in Alice’s small and cozy apartment at the Haus Angelika in St. Anton, and at her tranquil hunting preserve in the mountains above, where Dudley felt truly at home, perhaps for the first time in his life.

Dudley was comfortable and loved the mountains of Europe, but by early 1938 he was spending more time on his own than with Alice. With the excuse of pursuing his new passion, climbing, he spent huge chunks of time in Zermatt, Chamonix, and Trento. After only four years of marriage, he realized that he preferred his solitude, his freedom. He loved Alice, but it wasn’t enough to maintain a marriage and he told her he wanted a divorce.

In one of the rare times in her life that she showed weakness, Alice sat in her small living room in the Haus Angelika, put her head in her hands and cried. Her niece, who was visiting from America, watched from an alcove, stunned into silence at her aunt’s display of raw emotion. She had never seen it before and she would never see it again. Over the course of the next several months, while Dudley returned to Maine for the summer and Alice remained in Austria, they wrote many letters to each other about the failing marriage. She begged him to reconsider and return, hoping that he missed her as much as she missed him. But it was to no avail. The marriage was over.

While Dudley and Alice weren’t very good at marriage, they were wonderful friends and would remain close. In October they met in New York, and, after discussing some of the more mundane details of the divorce—her alimony, dividing the wedding gifts, and how long he would pay the rent on the apartment—they decided to have a party, show Dudley’s slides, and celebrate the fact that, divorce or no divorce, they were still the best of friends.

As Alice sat down to write out the invitations, she playfully wrote out the phonetic spelling of a guest’s name.

“Dear Mr. Vissner,” she wrote, inviting Fritz Wiessner to the slide show and dinner party, adding a PS: “Black tie!”

Fritz Wiessner, 1939.
(Courtesy of the George C. Sheldon Family)

A
t the start of the twentieth century, the earth’s highest places, fourteen peaks that stand above 8,000 meters (26,240 feet), were little known and entirely unconquered. While Dudley Wolfe was learning the ropes and anchors of sailing, adventurers across America and Europe were learning the ropes and anchors of a new exploit, extreme high-altitude climbing. Although the summit of 15,781-foot Mont Blanc had been reached in the late 1700s and the 14,692-foot Matterhorn had been first scaled in 1865, little was known of the mountains of the vast Himalayan range, or of man’s ability to survive at nearly twice the altitude of the roof of the Alps. But scientists, explorers, and mountaineers alike were determined to find out.

With the wildest edges of the earth thoroughly discovered, adventurers at the turn of the twentieth century set their sights on the far-off peaks of Nepal, Tibet, and India, and mountaineering clubs in London, Milan, Berlin, and New York organized expeditions to the still untouched giants.
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After early British and Italian explorers had tried and failed to climb K2, the world’s second highest peak, in remote northern India, they declared the mountain’s sheer cliffs, unrelenting avalanches, and brutal weather unconquerable. Then, because Britain’s “Great Game” with Russia after World War I determined which power would control central Asia, the British turned away from K2 and focused their attention on the world’s tallest (and therefore in the eyes of many, best) mountain, Everest. Not to be excluded from the great conquests, German climbers set their sights on Nanga Parbat, a 26,660-foot peak near K2 at the western edge of the Himalayas in northern India, and the Americans were left with the seemingly impossible K2.

Ironically, it would be a German immigrant built like a fireplug who was the driving force behind the American Alpine Club’s dedication to K2.

B
ORN IN
D
RESDEN
in 1900 into a prosperous but not wealthy family, Fritz Hermann Ernst Wiessner developed a passion for art, architecture, and opera, learning to love beauty and perfection, particularly in nature. He was also a patriot, and even though Germany was apparently losing the punishing Great War once the Americans entered it, as soon as he legally could he joined a special military unit called the Schützen and was shipped to the front lines near Belfort, close to the Crown Prince’s army. Luckily, the armistice was signed before Fritz saw any active duty, as most of the Schützen youth were killed within weeks on the front.

When the war ended, Fritz returned to his first love, the outdoors. Spending untold hours devouring his father’s mountaineering books, he read of the great exploits of the nineteenth-century climbers, from Charles Barrington on the Eiger in 1858 to the Matterhorn’s first and deadly ascent in 1865, when the Englishman George Hadow slipped on descent, pulling two other climbers in his party away from the face. A fourth teammate was able to wrap the rope around a rock but it snapped, and all of Zermatt watched through field glasses as the four men fell thousands of feet to their deaths down the north wall. The disaster would forever mythologize the mountain, and with every new generation of climbers there would be a fresh crop of men eager to challenge its deadly legacy. Still a teenager, Fritz Wiessner became one of them.

Throughout his life, Wiessner had a pronounced, almost balding forehead, yet retained a boyish face and impish smile. At only five feet five inches and with a body that was all sinew and muscle, he had the perfect physique for scaling rock walls using primarily his fingertips and toes. Fritz learned how to climb with his cousin Otto Wiessner, and together the two would travel to the sandstone towers of the Elbsteingebirge district south of Dresden. One weekend, Fritz took the train with some other climbers from a local club to a rock tower near the Czech border. Otto was delayed but planned to catch up with Fritz and the others at the wall; when Otto couldn’t find them, he ventured off on his own, soloing the so-called Winklerturm. As he descended he saw that another group on the wall had gotten into some trouble and went to assist them. Suddenly a sandstone block under his fingers came loose and he fell. Later that evening, Fritz walked through the small town near the wall and noticed that several locals who knew him were looking at him very oddly.

“What’s the matter?” Fritz finally asked a shopkeeper he recognized.

Without a word the man took him to a small house near the town’s inn. Entering the dark parlor, he could see that there was a body laid out on a table. Moving closer, he suddenly stopped, stunned and horrified. The bloody, crushed face was Otto’s.

At just twenty-one, Fritz suffered his first climbing death. It remained his most horrifying.

Otto’s death, though, did little to curb Wiessner’s love of the rock, and soon he was pioneering some of the hardest rock climbs in Europe, defining a new standard for technical difficulty while spurning the use of protective pitons to ascend the cliff walls. Throughout the Alps, his feats would go largely unchallenged for decades. His love of the mountains in large part dictated his life goals, including deciding he would climb every mountain in the Alps above 4,000 meters, or 13,000 feet. (Like the Himalayas, the Alps are measured in meters and those who climb them set goals to achieve the highest in each range.) No one could deny that he was fabulously talented on rock, but he was less gifted on snow, ice, and at high altitudes, once collapsing from mountain sickness at 12,800 feet on Mont Blanc and again at the same height on Mount Rainier outside of Seattle, Washington.

Famous as Fritz was for his brilliant and fearless climbing, he was infamous for his silent brooding and violent temper. When asked to describe him, everyone from his children to his worst detractors used words like “sullen,” “stubborn,” “temperamental,” and “explosive.” Some offered “romantic,” “depressive,” and “Germanic.” With fierce mood swings that would take him from cheerful and engaged to raging and resentful within seconds, Wiessner was a complex and driven personality. The term “he does not suffer fools gladly” could have been coined to describe him. He could utterly dismiss a person who lacked the proper social standing, and he refused to even look at a climbing partner while the man’s elbows were on the table or if he held his fork like a shovel rather than a pen. But Fritz could also show enormous patience when talking to a novice climber, explaining the differences between climbing on limestone and on granite, or how to properly use one’s toes to power up the rock while the fingers merely acted as guides up the wall. As much as he could be a snob about poetry and etiquette, he would take anyone who asked into the mountains, proud to introduce the man or woman to their pristine beauty and complicated rock walls. While he was something of a feminist, including women on rock and mountain climbing expeditions at a time when women had barely been allowed to vote, never mind belay a man on a rope, he also shared a tent with many of them, which begs the question of his motivation. Nonetheless, his inclusion of women on some of his tough expeditions indicated a liberalism not often in evidence in the early days of American, British, Italian, and German climbing.

In short, Fritz Wiessner was admired and hated, respected and reviled. For Fritz, it was simply all about climbing. The main things he wanted to know about others were: Did the man use fixed protection? Did he climb unsupported or did he need a phalanx of gear and men below him? Did he leave the rock untouched by his having been there? Did he puff up his own resumé, claiming a height never reached or a new route not actually achieved? And mostly, did he make the summit?

While he could be quite charming, he was also unabashedly German. On a climbing trip to Communist-controlled Dresden in the 1970s, he took his daughter to a restaurant unfortunately situated near a pig farm; he marched into the dining room with his pigeon-like strut and loudly exclaimed to the largely military diners, “Phew! One can smell the influence of the Russians!”

He was also notorious for his abhorrence of all things mechanical: radios, cameras, even bicycles. If it had a moving part which he might at some point have to adjust, Fritz avoided it whenever possible. Automobiles were his Achilles heel, which may have accounted for his appalling driving habits. Hunched forward with his chin nearly on the steering wheel, he commandeered the road as if every car in front of him were there to be overtaken, all the while jerking and lurching through traffic because he was never able to master the clutch. Once, while driving through East Germany with American climber Henry Barber in 1972, he became increasingly frustrated and confused by the traffic patterns and pedestrian paths and turned sharply between the lanes of traffic onto a footpath. Police in stiff blue uniforms and large black hats came from every direction trying to get him back on course, but Fritz waved them off, as if they were pesky flies rather than members of the Communist military police. He kept going on the footpath until he reached a break in the cement barrier and finally drove back onto the road. He never understood even the basic mechanics of a car, starting with filling the tank. On that same trip to Germany with Barber when Fritz was in his early seventies, he walked around the car at a gas station with the nozzle in his hand, scratching his head trying to figure out how the fuel got into the car. Reaching the end of his tolerance, he merely stuck the nozzle into the wheel well and started pumping. The irate attendant came running and, after a lot of shouting and gesticulating by both men, told Fritz to get back in the car while the man pumped the gas himself. Fritz blamed the incident on the car’s poor design, rather than his own inability to understand its mechanics. Fritz was a man who couldn’t be wrong.

By the late 1920s, with the post–World War I depression lingering throughout Europe and business increasingly difficult in war-torn Germany, Fritz decided it was time to leave his beloved Saxony and live in America, even though he knew there was a risk that he might one day have to bear arms against his own homeland.

After making his way to America on the SS
St. Louis
in March 1929, Wiessner found work as a chemist and engineer in New York City, but money was always tight and he supplemented his income with a variety of odd jobs. Oddest among them was washing the windows on the world’s highest building at the time, the Empire State Building. Unlike today’s unionized window washers, who work on protected scaffolding and in limited shifts, Fritz washed the windows while hanging off the building on a single hemp rope tied around his waist, from sunup to sundown, as long as the daylight allowed. Floor by floor, with just his squeegee, a bucket, and the rope, he worked his way up and across the building several stories at a time. He loved the work and would hang high above New York feeling not like an hourly laborer but like a Titan in command of the city beneath him.

While his work as a chemist was interesting, it did not pay well and Fritz struggled to make ends meet. Still, with every spare dollar he scraped together, Fritz would venture on the weekends to the rock climbing areas scattered throughout the Hudson Valley, Connecticut Valley, and New Hampshire, where he soon became acquainted with America’s still nascent climbing community.

The American Alpine Club, hoping to replicate London’s venerable Alpine Club, had been established in 1902 by a handful of well-heeled industrialists and intellectuals who had the time and money to climb mountains. In this era, before corporate sponsorships and lucrative media deals, climbers paid the entire cost of their expeditions themselves, which meant that the mountaineering community was limited to affluent adventurers and those whom they invited to join them. By the early 1930s, the club rented space in lower Manhattan for its meetings, charged ten dollars in annual dues, and hadn’t grown much beyond the tweed and leather set that founded it. But it was nonetheless the sole representative of a climbing class in America and, when one of its most respected members, Robert Underhill, agreed to sponsor him in 1932, Fritz readily joined. He had a rich man’s tastes if not a rich man’s resources, and his enormous talent for climbing and his extensive history of record-setting climbs made him an immediate force in that company.

With his transatlantic connections getting stronger every day, Wiessner was asked to help organize a German–American expedition to climb Nanga Parbat. It would be his first venture to extreme high altitude and a bid to make history. With money a persistent problem, Fritz brought in one of his well-heeled climbing partners from New York, Rand Herron, an aesthete and poet who by the age of thirty had also achieved a long list of first ascents, from the High Atlas in Morocco, to the Russian Caucasus, to Lapland, where he traveled eight hundred miles on skis. Rand then invited his girlfriend to join the climb. She was a journalist named Elizabeth Knowlton, whose articles for the
New York Times
would help raise money for the expedition.

With degrees from both Vassar and Radcliffe colleges, Knowlton was the second woman to set foot on one of the Himalayan 8,000-meter peaks (the first was fellow American Fanny Bullock Workman, who explored the Karakoram with her husband in the late 1890s and early 1900s). Although Knowlton was a strong climber, when Wiessner’s team reached 21,000 feet on Nanga Parbat it was decided that she would not continue any higher. In her excellent book about the expedition,
The Naked Mountain
, published in 1933, she expressed no anger or resentment at not remaining a member of the climbing team. Instead, she acknowledged that she was there primarily as a writer, not a high-altitude climber.