The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (7 page)

Charlie and his “brotherhood of the rope” returned to the States and were celebrated coast to coast as conquering heroes, feted with extravagant dinners and given a lucrative book contract. Their reconnaissance of the mountain had been successful, and Charlie and the team reported that the Abruzzi Ridge up the east spine of the mountain provided the best chance at the summit. While steep, unforgiving, and providing little by way of proper campsites, the route was, except for a section between Camps VI and VIII between 23,000 and 25,000 feet, relatively free of avalanche danger.

With Houston’s team home and priceless new information about the route in hand, it was now Fritz’s turn. Charlie shared every detail of his own expedition with Fritz, from the grueling 330-mile trek to the mountain to 26,500 feet on the Abruzzi Ridge, the point he and Petzoldt had reached before turning back. Houston even wrote Wiessner a two-page, single-spaced note in which he delineated the climbing route from base camp, up the glacier to the base of the route, through each of the high camps, to his and Petzoldt’s high point, explaining every major rock formation, obstacle, tent platform, and avalanche-prone slope on the 12,000-foot ascent. He also sent photos and amended the Duke of Abruzzi’s maps of the mountain, explaining in careful detail where and why they chose the route and camps they did. Fritz now had a virtual blueprint for his climb.

Fritz turned his attention to building a strong team. He was at a crossroads in his life and he wanted K2. He needed K2. He was thirty-eight years old, single, and not yet an American citizen. He was living in a small apartment in the Columbia Heights section of Brooklyn and his ski wax business was barely covering his bills. With business only getting worse as the Depression rolled on, he was forced to send solicitation letters to friends and colleagues, many of them in the Alpine Club, asking them to invest in his company. When they did, it was rarely more than twenty-five dollars. To make ends meet and to stay in shape, he worked several jobs, including washing windows on the Empire State Building. Every day he dealt with the growing anti-German sentiment, not only in the club but in the country as a whole, as another world war looked more probable every day. He had always hoped to find a rich American widow and live the good life, but so far that hadn’t happened. K2 was his chance to move beyond his modest life and to make something of himself. After Knowlton’s success, he saw that America had a fascination with the Himalayas and that a living could be made climbing them. If he were to climb this so-called unclimbable mountain in India, he would be set for life, possibly even as a guide for his well-heeled friends in the AAC who were itching to explore the giant peaks. He had been dreaming of K2 for years, mapping out every aspect of the expedition in minute detail. But with only a couple of months before he was to leave for the mountain, he still hadn’t nailed down his team or its funding. His whole dream could vanish if he didn’t recruit enough teammates to cover the $15,000 cost of the undertaking.

Then Fritz received a note from Alice Wolfe inviting him to attend a black-tie dinner party at the Wolfes’ Fifth Avenue penthouse where her husband, Dudley, would show some of his climbing slides from Europe.

Suddenly, the expedition’s future looked much brighter.

The 1939 American K2 team: Back row, left to right: George Sheldon, Chappell Cranmer, Jack Durrance, George Trench; front row, left to right: Eaton Cromwell, Fritz Wiessner, Dudley Wolfe.
(Courtesy of the George C. Sheldon Family)

W
ithin weeks of seeing Fritz at the slide show, Dudley had committed to going to K2. He booked his passage to Europe, sublet the penthouse, updated his will, and ordered the necessary equipment and clothes: a new ice axe, two pairs of leather mountaineering boots, the best steel crampons he could find, and layers of wool and silk underwear. What he hadn’t done was tell his family, in particular his older brother, Clifford.

From the day the brothers had returned from World War I, Clifford had taken charge of running the family and its businesses. Their grandfather had been close to ninety at the time and Clifford was the eldest of his male heirs, so it had fallen to him. While Clifford and Dudley were close, loving brothers, they were very different men. Each was reserved and conservative, both politically and socially, but Dudley made adventure his life while Clifford donned a three-piece suit and polished brown leather shoes and made his life the family business. While he had no control over his younger brother, Clifford nonetheless judged Dudley’s lifestyle that of a playboy and not a serious man. When Dudley wrote of hunting in the hills above St. Anton and skiing down the couloirs of Chamonix, Clifford responded rather stiffly how “grand it must be to have the time for such exploits.” In the year before the expedition, Clifford had had enough of bearing the entire burden while Dudley played and had suggested that perhaps Dudley should spend some time with him on Wall Street and learn the family business.

For his part, Dudley knew Clifford was right. His brother had taken on managing the estate and overseeing the books of the vast Smith fortune, and done a damn fine job of it, while he merely had his name on the door at their New York offices. And yet Clifford seemed to thrive on the spreadsheets and business pages of the
New York Times
as Dudley never had. Instead, he had tried to define himself through ever more daring challenges. Rather than let his poor eyesight allow him to sit out the war, he had gone to Europe and volunteered with the French Foreign Legion. In deciding to race across the Atlantic, he had shown the world it could be done in a sixty-foot schooner. In climbing in the Alps he had fought hurricane winds and traversed crevasses where only days before men had been lost.

But Clifford did not consider his brother’s exploits a legitimate use of time, and as Dudley packed his bags for yet another adventure, this one nearly a year long by the time he would finally set foot back in America, he put off telling his brother of the expedition. Instead, he left Boston before the Christmas holidays giving the impression that he would return to Maine in time to put his new sleek, single-masted racing sloop, the
Highland Light
, in the water for the season, most likely by mid-May. With his ticket to Bombay already in hand, he had no intention of doing so.

Before leaving for K2, and with a list of things to accomplish before he did, Dudley went to New York and hurriedly met with his attorney to draw up a new will. While in the city, he went to see his cousin, Clifford Warren Smith, Jr. Just as B. F. had feared, the man, now thirty-seven, was steadily killing himself with a fast life, well lubricated by alcohol, illegal drugs, and a revolving door of women, the latest being a Ziegfeld Follies cigarette girl. While even Clifford Junior’s mother had written him off as irredeemable, Dudley remained in touch with his cousin and even considered delaying his trip overseas when he seemed close to death. But, having been assured by the doctors that Clifford Junior wasn’t in imminent danger, Dudley continued getting his own estate in order for his protracted absence.

From New York, Dudley traveled to Boston where he made sure to buy some items which would be with him every step of the way: two pairs of double-layer khaki pants from Blauer’s in Harvard Square and a pair of Asa Osborne’s world-famous leather and canvas gauntlets with fitted wool liners. He had walked to Osborne’s store on Beacon Street himself, just to make sure of the fit. They were the best cold-weather gloves made, and Dudley felt a certain satisfaction flexing his hands in the soft leather mitt. As he had in the ambulance corps and before each sailing race, Dudley pulled out a fine-tipped fountain pen, carefully spelling out
“W O L F E
” on each of his items, from his fleece-lined anorak to the cuff of his Osborne gloves. One afternoon he stood like a model in his new gear, turning this way and that in front of a tall standing mirror in his bedroom, making sure everything fit and had no loose seams. His nephew walked by the open door and couldn’t resist telling his uncle he looked like a page out of the L. L. Bean catalogue. Dudley smiled and nodded.

On December 10, 1938, Dudley made a final check of his gear and papers before leaving for the harbor where the SS
Georgic
waited to take him to Europe. As he left B. F.’s house at 21 Commonwealth Avenue, where Mabel had spent more and more time during the old man’s last years, Dudley was suddenly glad his mother had died several years before.

One of the last times he had seen his mother, he had joined her in her favorite holiday event, something she called “contributing to the Police Fund.” Every Christmas she would dress in her Sunday best, down to the velvet blouse with her grandmother’s cameo at her neck and a sable shawl wrapped loosely around her shoulders, call for the car to be brought around to the front of the house, and then be driven the length of Commonwealth Avenue. Whenever she saw a policeman, she would have the driver pull over so that she could extend her gloved hand through the window to give the officer money. The cop would tip his hat and bow with a “Thank you, Miss Smith,” as he tucked the bills into his heavy overcoat. It was a tradition she had learned as a girl first in Omaha and then here in Boston, driving the rounds with B. F. In those days, of course, she and her father had ridden in a horse-drawn carriage and B. F. had brought a bottle of whiskey and cups and would stop and drink with each man as if he were a cousin. Like her father, she believed the tradition helped keep their lavish home and property safe from criminals.

Mabel had always worried more about him, Dudley thought, than she had about either of his brothers, even though Grafton, as it turned out, was the son who had needed the extra concern. He, Dudley, had always managed to balance his adventure with prudence and planning. From his trench warfare to his transatlantic racing, he had respected danger, not challenged it, and had known when to pull back, on the gas and on the tiller, in order to remain within a safe margin while staying in the game.

Dudley closed the three-inch-thick mahogany door and walked across the brick sidewalk and cobblestone street to his waiting car. Although he had already experienced many adventures, Dudley knew he was taking the first steps on the journey of his lifetime.

Before he climbed into his car, he counted all of his new Abercrombie and Fitch duffels and assorted hard leather cases with his cameras and filming equipment. Assured they were all there, he took a final look at the grand house and its expansive gardens, now covered in a pre-Christmas snowfall. He would miss an entire year of seasons. Between the travel and the time on the mountain, he wouldn’t return to Boston until next October or November, just as the first snows of winter were falling.

He reminded his driver which pier the boat was leaving from and sat back as the car slowly pulled away from the curb, its tires crunching on the icy snow.

As excited as he was about the expedition, he was also glad to be spending another Christmas with Alice in St. Anton. Their divorce, while heavy with her grief and his guilt, had nonetheless been as gentle as their marriage, and when she had asked him to come for her annual Christmas celebration he happily accepted. She made much of the season, particularly a tradition she had begun with the local children who would clamor beneath her windows yelling “
Danke
, Auntie Alice” as she threw sweets and candies to them from above. These holiday traditions gave her what she called her “annual dose” of children and she enjoyed playing the extravagant and eccentric American aunt, if only for a week at a time.

After Christmas with Alice, Dudley traveled to Switzerland for the New Year celebrations and to spend two months skiing and glacier walking. When he got to Davos and settled into his room at the Derby Hotel, he sat down to organize his thoughts. It was finally time to tell Clifford of his plans. As he began the long letter, he first detailed his climbing resumé over the past five years, assuring Clifford of the difficulty, danger, and rarity of some of his achievements:

After detailing the seven team members, Dudley explained that the entire cost of the expedition would be $17,500 ($262,500 today), with each of the seven contributing $2,500,
^*
a sum Dudley thought a bargain:

Considering what the same amount of time at the Derby in Davos or the Ritz in Paris would have cost, he was right.

Dudley continued:

Dudley described the climbing route they would tackle up the mountain and wrote that, because it was primarily along a rock ridge, there was less danger of avalanche than on an otherwise easier slope. Finally, and with an eerie prescience, he spoke of the danger above the high camps, assuring Clifford that “if risks are taken it will be between the last camp and the top.” In closing, he told Clifford that “my house is completely in order” and that he had drawn up a new will just before leaving the States, things he pointed out not to alarm his brother but to assure him of his “good sense.”

With that he wished Clifford a fine winter and said that he would see him on his return sometime in October. In a postscript he asked Clifford to send American, state of Maine, and Harvard flags so that he could raise all three at base camp.

Clifford responded immediately to what he called Dudley’s “most interesting letter,” and agreed that this adventure could be a defining moment, as if his brother’s life to this point had been rather unremarkable:

In February Dudley went to Chamonix to climb Mont Blanc. Climbing a ridge above the Vallot hut, he and his French guide struggled through subzero temperatures and 50–60 mile-per-hour winds, climbing only one hundred feet in an hour before they finally turned back. The guide, freezing cold with an already white nose from frostbite, was desperate to get back to the hut and had them traverse the crevasse-littered glacier unroped, something Dudley thought very careless. A few weeks later he attempted the Piz Palu (12,800 feet) on the Italian–Swiss border with his favorite guide, Elias Julien, and an English client. Again with temperatures close to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit and winds threatening to blow them off the ridge, the men roped up and continued on toward the summit. Dudley was going well but the Englishman began to suffer from the cold. Knowing it would be harder to get the man down once hypothermia and frostbite took hold, Elias turned them back only twenty minutes from the top—a tantalizingly close distance for anyone who has overcome the odds and paid good money to reach a summit. However, rather than insist on continuing, Dudley agreed completely with Elias’s decision to retreat and thought the guide a fine man as well as a splendid climber.

In early March he received a letter from Alice full of teasing urgency: “The reason I particularly wanted to see you [in Paris] was to beg you, for God’s sake, to be careful on this K2 trip. Remember, Dudley Francis, it’s a big grim proposition and you won’t have Elias.
Please
don’t take any risks and for God’s sake be careful—sweet Gingus!” Her pet name for him always made him smile, even if she did continue to misspell “Genghis.” He tucked the letter into his etui; it would travel with him to the mountain.