The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (6 page)

As the men continued without her, they faced a series of setbacks. They had been forced to hire inexperienced Kashmiri porters from Hunza in northern India because the more skilled Darjeeling Sherpas (Tibetan for “east people”) had already been taken by another expedition. Wiessner described the Hunza as “strong, tall men of the Aryan race,” but they nonetheless suffered from the high altitude and increasing fear of mountain spirits.
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Fritz reported that when they finally reached 21,000 feet, the porters were “of no use whatsoever.” Fritz left them there to rest for a few days with instructions to resume carrying loads up the mountain for the team as soon as they were able. Meanwhile, he and the other climbers toiled on and managed to reach a height of 23,000 feet on July 29. A series of storms dumped monstrous amounts of snow on the mountain; in some places it was up to their necks and they had to “swim” through it using both arms and legs to propel themselves forward. Having no communication with the support team below, they had no idea that the porters weren’t merely resting but had called it quits, refusing to climb any further. Fritz, Willy Merkl, and the summit team sat for nearly a month, their strength slowly withering, their stamina and drive dissipating day after day as they waited for food and fuel that never came. On August 20 they were “finally obliged” to retreat down the mountain. After five weeks at 23,000 feet, Fritz found the thicker air and fresh food a “great relief and immediate benefit.” While little was known in 1932 of the physiological devastation of long exposure to high altitude, Wiessner knew first-hand that he and his men had suffered from their thirty-five days on the mountain. After two years of planning, fundraising, training, and arduous travel to reach the foot of the mountain, the team was finished. In
The Naked Mountain
, Knowlton described the expedition as an exercise in “frustration and futility.”

The team failed to reach the summit, but great heights had been reached on an 8,000-meter peak and, more important, no man (or woman) had been lost. All in all, it was not a bad showing for a Himalayan expedition in the 1930s.

However, when Fritz returned to New York, he was not greeted by plaudits. America was reading every day of Adolf Hitler, a short, strutting, autocratic, volatile dictator who bore an unfortunate resemblance to Fritz himself. Then, in 1934, another German expedition to Nanga Parbat lost ten members, including its leader, Willy Merkl, who had also led the 1932 trip. Climbers in the American Alpine Club were beginning to wonder if the Germanic temperament coupled with the demands of the Third Reich to summit against all odds was not a lethal combination. Several club members began to challenge Fritz Wiessner’s membership, and unsubstantiated but persistent rumors spread that he sympathized with and perhaps was even spying for the Third Reich. After the Nanga Parbat disaster, several members called for his resignation from the club. But Fritz also had his defenders, chief among them his good friends Robert Underhill, one of America’s esteemed fathers of rock climbing, and his wife, Miriam Underhill, a talented and pioneering climber in her own right. In a letter of apology to Wiessner for the club’s “grave mistake” in publicly challenging his membership, Underhill told Fritz how personally frustrated he was that Americans were somehow unable to “understand Hitler and what he has done for Germany.” He went on to lament that Americans “cannot realize the moral and spiritual revival which…Hitler seems to have been able to bring about. You have no doubt long since made up your mind simply to endure this almost universal misinterpretation of Hitler and Germany, but I am terribly sorry to see it break out in our club, in such a way.”

Anti-German sentiment had been rampant in the United States ever since the start of the Great War two decades earlier, and Fritz felt the sting of prejudice in other places as well. Eventually, the threats of expulsion from the AAC subsided, but the rumors never did, and while not a shred of evidence ever surfaced to suggest that Wiessner was working with Germany after he emigrated, many in the club deemed him a Nazi spy to their dying day.

In the spring of 1935, Wiessner and a group of his European friends, who had all cut their climbing teeth in the Alps, were cresting a cliff in the Shawangunk (pronounced Shon-gum) Mountains one hundred miles north of New York City when they looked to the north and saw a long, high line of white quartz cliffs in the distance. Returning the next weekend, Fritz found a 230-foot-high, eight-mile-long band of seemingly endless climbing routes. His subsequent establishment of the northeast’s most famed climbing area near New Paltz, New York, called the Gunks in climbing circles, is legendary. He and Austrian climber Hans Kraus (Alice Wolfe’s friend whom she helped free from Nazi detainment) used only three pitons in the upper section of their otherwise free ascent of High Exposure, one of the “jewels of the Gunks,” an overhanging cliff of serrated bands hundreds of feet above the alluvial plains of the Hudson River Valley. Wiessner’s climbing broke such new ground that at a meeting of the American Alpine Club in 1964, when a climber was crowing about having made a first ascent on a crag in Connecticut, Fritz tactfully interrupted and told the man that he in fact had pioneered the route over twenty years before.

From upstate New York, Fritz traveled west in the summer of 1936 to the Canadian Rockies, where the Coast Range’s highest and still unclimbed mountain stood waiting: Mount Waddington. After sixteen attempts had failed and two climbers had died trying, many believed the 13,260-foot Waddington, more of a stark rock icicle than a real mountain, was simply not climbable. Fritz, however, considered it a puzzle to be solved. For his expedition he chose a small and eclectic group of close friends and stellar athletes, among them William House, a twenty-three-year-old forester from New Hampshire who had relatively little expedition experience but had already gained a name for himself on the rock walls of the White Mountains. And, echoing his inclusion of Elizabeth Knowlton on Nanga Parbat, Fritz included Betty Woolsey, who had raced on Alice Wolfe’s women’s US Olympic ski team in Garmisch the previous February. Not only were Woolsey and Knowlton strong athletes, their very presence helped Fritz to raise awareness and much-needed funds for a string of climbs in the 1930s and 1940s. But, like Knowlton, lacking climbing experience, when summit day came Woolsey was relegated to the support team, and was not one of its stars going for the top.

After weeks of preparation lower on the mountain, on July 26 Fritz and Bill House rose at 2:45 a.m. and began their thirteen-hour assault. Climbers who had already tried to reach the summit and failed watched the two men’s progress through field glasses, spying them at 10:30 a.m. carefully traversing a narrow snow patch that clung to an almost vertical face. At 3 p.m., the glint of an ice axe near the summit was spied from ten miles away. And finally, at 3:40 p.m., Fritz was seen inching his way along a knife-edged snow ridge the final feet to the summit, with House close on his heels. Two Americans had conquered Canada’s most sought-after peak and Wiessner’s reputation as a fearless climber only increased.

Wiessner quickly followed that exploit by aiming for Wyoming’s Grand Teton and its unclimbed north face. After examining topographical maps of the mountain and repeatedly climbing to the base of the route to stare at its jagged cliffs, he finally decided on his course up the sheer rock wall. On August 10, 1936, he positioned himself at the base of the route and, again with the formidable Woolsey there for the press rather than as a summit partner, organized his gear for the morning’s climb.

Earlier that evening, Wiessner had run into a Teton guide whom he pumped for information about the route and the conditions on the mountain. The guide, Paul Petzoldt, answered all of his questions, bid him goodnight, then raced down into the valley to roust his brother, Eldon, and his summer hired hand, Jack Durrance, out of bed. Explaining that Fritz Wiessner was at the base of the Grand and poised to make its first ascent, Petzoldt insisted that they, not Wiessner, should have the honors of the great North Face prize. Less than an hour later, packed and ready for the assault, the trio tiptoed past Wiessner’s quiet tent, where he and Woolsey slept. Working through the night and into the morning, with Durrance leading the route most of the way, the three men made the much-coveted summit by midday. When Wiessner rose he learned that Durrance and the Petzoldts had in effect stolen his first ascent. He went ahead anyway, making what was then the second ascent. The insult so infuriated Fritz that two years later, when Paul Petzoldt applied for membership in the American Alpine Club, Fritz lobbied hard against his inclusion, telling a club official that Petzoldt was “not the kind of man we want as a member.”
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After his bittersweet success on the Grand, Fritz set his sights on an odd geological rock formation in eastern Wyoming which had beguiled countless generations of Native American Indians and pioneers: Devil’s Tower. Looking somewhat like a ruined Bundt cake on an empty banquet table, the 2,367-foot plug of igneous rock juts out of the ground in the middle of the plains thirty miles from the South Dakota border. According to Sioux legend, the tower was created by the Great Spirit, who lifted the rock high above the Belle Fourche River Valley to save three maidens being pursued by bears. As the bears tried to reach the maidens on the elevated rock, each slipped and fell, leaving claw marks that give the rock its distinctive, fluted surface. After the bears fell to their deaths, the maidens slid down from their lofty perch on a rope of wildflowers.

The first recorded climb of Devil’s Tower was in 1893 when two ranchers, dressed in overalls and cowboy boots, assembled a ladder of individual wooden pegs which they pounded into the deep cracks, remnants of which can still be seen. On the top, they left a large American flag.

Theatrics aside, the man most famous for his ascent is Fritz Wiessner, who in 1937 not only climbed it without a ladder (or flag), but without any protective gear save a single piton near the top which he later regretted, saying it was unnecessary. Breathing in great huffs and puffs from the effort, Wiessner inched his body up the cracks and crags, leading partners Bill House and Lawrence Coveney the entire route. Nearing the top, he shouted down to his partners. While the words were unintelligible, their meaning was clear to House, who had heard them before on Waddington. The words meant “We are going to the top.”

With an odd sort of fate cementing their relationship, the next man to climb Devil’s Tower in a style which would become legendary was Jack Durrance, in September 1938. Like Wiessner, he and his partners climbed it “free”—without protective gear anchoring them to the rock in case of a fall. The line he chose to ascend was named the Durrance Route and has become the Tower’s most common ascent for today’s climbers.

Even while he was making headlines on American mountains and rock walls, Fritz remained fascinated by the mountains in remote southern Asia. Those stunning peaks were majestic, never scaled, and twice as high as anything in Europe or the American lower forty-eight, and Wiessner knew that if he succeeded in reaching even one of the summits, he would secure his future as well as a place in climbing history. He had seen the way Knowlton’s articles and book on Nanga Parbat had gained her fame and a certain measure of fortune; if he were to actually come home with a summit, he thought his story would be invaluable.

Having proven himself an able high-altitude climber on Nanga Parbat (although Willy Merkl told the president of the Alpine Club in London that he didn’t trust Wiessner on snow enough to invite him to join Germany’s 1934 attempt
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), Wiessner lobbied the American Alpine Club to give him control of America’s first major assault on K2 in 1938. However, when India finally issued a permit in October 1937, Wiessner didn’t have the money to leave. He had recently started his own business making and selling ski wax and it was struggling; to leave it for several months was financially impossible. He handed the reins over to one of his climbing partners, a young man who was in his third year of medical school at Columbia, Charles S. Houston (pronounced How-stun, like the street in lower Manhattan).

Fritz and Charlie were good friends, having spent years skiing in New Hampshire and climbing the rock walls near New Haven, Connecticut, together. Although Fritz was thirteen years older than Charlie, both were new members of the American Alpine Club, and they enjoyed each other’s company. But when Wiessner turned down the leadership of the 1938 expedition for which he had lobbied so hard, many, including Houston, suspected ulterior motives, namely that he was waiting for another team to do the Herculean work of finding the best route up the mountain, a route which Wiessner could then merely climb, saving weeks of valuable expedition time and energy. Before stepping aside, Wiessner made it clear that he wanted the 1939 permit for K2, if granted. Meanwhile, Houston assumed leadership of the 1938 attempt. Before Charlie left for the mountain, Fritz told his friend that it was much more important to come through “without the loss of life rather than a brilliant success brought through being reckless.”

Over seventy years later, Charlie Houston’s 1938 American expedition to K2 is still singled out as one of the finest in Himalayan climbing history on all fronts: the talent of its climbers, the preparation and execution of their goal, which was to ascertain the most climbable route, the hard work and careful risk management, and the cooperation, respect, and even love among the members of the team.
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Except for some ugly business after the expedition involving Paul Petzoldt and an American missionary’s wife,
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the team was hugely successful. Houston and Petzoldt climbed thousands of feet higher on the mountain than any man ever had, and there was speculation that they might even have made the summit if not for a limited supply of matches—needed to melt snow for cooking and, more important, drinking water. However, Houston said later that even if he had had more matches, he could not have gone farther. He had reached his climbing ceiling. Those moments at 26,000 feet, his personal altitude record, were crystallized in his brain as the most emotionally charged minutes of his life, as he struggled to control his racing pulse and mixed feelings of regret and relief at deciding to turn back.