The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2

by Jennifer Jordan

  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:

  Please do not think I am blowing my own horn; you will understand when you see what I am leading up to.

  A short time ago* I received an invitation from Fritz Wiessner, leader of the American Alpine Club expedition to the Hymalia [sic] to join the expedition in an attempt to climb Karakoram (K2) 28,600 [sic] ft, the world’s second highest mountain. This invitation, after carefully looking into the expedition, I have accepted.

  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:

  In other words, $2,500.00 covers all my expenses from March 15 until about October 1 when I am back in New York. I would say it was very cheap.

  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:

  On this expedition there will be no professional guides, but Wiessner is as good as the best guides and will have the complete planning of the climb. As he reached one of the highest points on Nanga Parbat and has had much other experience, I feel that he will be most conservative. He impresses me as being a most careful climber. Finally, realize that the men taking part in this trip are mature, responsible, professional men and married men, some with families, who will not take foolish risks.†

  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:

  I think you are doing it with a minimum of risk and after all, if you do climb this mountain you have certainly done something and made a wonderful record.

  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.

  Finally March 16 arrived and Dudley traveled to London to meet Fritz Wiessner as he disembarked in Southampton. From there they went on a ten-day buying trip for the team’s provisions: wool hats and gloves in London and hobnailed leather boots in Germany, steel pitons in France, snow goggles at Hamblins and heavy canvas tents and duffels at Abercrombie’s, Primus stoves, English oatmeal, and Danish canned pemmican, a foul-tasting but lifesaving mixture of fat and protein invented by Native American Indians and Eskimos which helped them survive the brutally cold North American and Alaskan winters. The list seemed endless. Dudley was excited to be involved in the expedition’s early planning, but his early excitement soon became concern as time after time Wiessner came up short at the cash register and Dudley was forced to step in to pay the bill. It was also becoming very annoying to have it assumed that he would pay for their expensive dinners and cab fares. There seemed to be an unspoken “Oh, it’s nothing to you” attitude, and he was increasingly chafing at it. He had encountered such attitudes his entire life, from sailing across the ocean with young dock workers to skiing above St. Anton with Alice’s wonderful but financially struggling friends. He had always been the one to settle the bill, and while they were right in that he barely felt it financially, perpetually picking up the tab did make him feel as if he were merely the purse behind the activity and not an active participant in its gaiety.

  Here he was again, feeling like the chauffeur who pays his boss’s bar bill, following Wiessner around with his wallet, settling his accounts. What Dudley didn’t know was that the expedition had all but bankrupted Fritz, who had been forced to give up his apartment before leaving for the expedition and now lived out of his small office. While Fritz always assured Dudley that he would be repaid, Dudley couldn’t help but wonder how. After one too many of these shopping incidents Dudley cabled his secretary, Henr
y Meyer in New York, and asked him to determine if every member of the expedition was paying what he had and to ascertain the ability of the expedition’s coffers to repay Fritz’s ever-growing debt to him. Meyer called Joel Fisher, the American Alpine Club’s treasurer, and over the phone was quoted how much each member had paid. Fisher also made it a point to tell Meyer that the team was not financially tied to the club in any way. Meyer cabled Dudley back within the day, assuring him that the other three members already on their way to Europe had all paid the same amount. But he also told Dudley something that Fritz had not: a couple of the team’s strongest members had dropped out of the expedition and, with Fritz in Europe, the American Alpine Club was now scrambling to find replacements. The club was hoping to confirm one of Fritz’s alternate choices, and if this man joined, he would do so at a discounted rate of only $1,500, most of which the club itself would pay because the man didn’t have it personally and no one in the club had been found to subsidize the expedition.

  Having already paid his full $2,500 fee as well as countless chits for equipment and dinners, Dudley decided to step back and let Fritz figure out how to pay for his expedition on his own. Enough was enough and they weren’t even on the expedition yet.

  Before heading to Italy to meet the rest of the team, Fritz went to Munich where he had several meetings. He didn’t tell Dudley what the nature of the meetings was, nor did Dudley ask. When they parted, Dudley got into his Phaeton roadster for one last drive through his beloved Alps, across the Italian border and south to meet the team in Genoa, the port from which they would sail as a team to Bombay.

  For over two years, since October 1937 when India had granted the first permit to climb K2, Wiessner had been sending out letters of invitation, trying to assemble the team to end all teams. Unfortunately, many of the already small crop of America’s top-notch climbers experienced enough to tackle a mountain of K2’s demands had gone to the mountain the year before with Charlie Houston, and none was willing or able to take another six-to seven-month leave of absence from his life so soon after.

  By early February 1939, Fritz’s invitation to join the team had been turned down by an august list of America’s finest climbers, including Adams Carter, Alfred Lindley, Sterling Hendricks, Lincoln O’Brien, Lawrence Coveney, and brothers Hassler and Roger Whitney, who, when he wrote Fritz his regrets, indicated a certain alarm at the team’s lack of strength and experience: “Your crowd is very different from the men I had supposed you were going to have, but it sounds like a good one and I congratulate you on your progress so far.” Fritz also approached the men who had been on the 1938 expedition whom he’d hoped to re-enlist, including Bob Bates, Dick Burdsall, and finally his partner on both Devil’s Tower and Mount Waddington, Bill House. Fritz never invited Charlie Houston to join the expedition, a decision Houston saw more as a necessity than a snub, years later admitting, “A team could only have one leader and for him and me to have been on the same expedition would have put us into a power struggle from the start.” Reading through many of the other climbers’ cordial letters of regret, it is hard to discern whether family, school, work, and money commitments were the real reasons or whether they said no because of Wiessner. Not only was anti-German sentiment widespread throughout America, but his reputation as a difficult and demanding leader had become well known in the small climbing community. Years later Bill House would admit that his decision to climb with Houston’s team in 1938 and not Wiessner’s in 1939 was because he “did not want to be on another major expedition with [Wiessner]. Too many personality clashes between us.”*

  One man, Bestor Robinson, a climber and full-time attorney, wrote to Fritz that the expedition would be “the finest summer possible to climb on one of the big peaks under your leadership” even though his work schedule might make the trip an “irrational” shirking of his responsibilities. Still, Bestor thought that if he were able to travel straight to the mountain, he might be able to enjoy what Fritz had described as “an opportunity of a lifetime.” But, his work and family obligations were a concern, so he held back on giving Fritz a definite yes until he figured out the details of what a prolonged absence would take.

  Even if Robinson was able to join, Wiessner was still at least two climbers short of a competent team for a mountain of K2’s size. However, he refused at least one man who had approached him to be on the team: Paul Petzoldt. The American Alpine Club was still smarting from the black eye he had given the club the year before with the missionary’s mysterious death, and some club directors doubted whether he could even get back into India. Further, Fritz had not forgotten the Grand Teton hijacking. Even though many credited Petzoldt as the strongest climber on the 1938 team, something Fritz desperately needed to bolster his weak roster of members, he refused to include him on the expedition.*

  Nevertheless, Fritz went out of his way to encourage another climber from the Teton offense to join the team: Jack Durrance. While many imagined that Fritz harbored a resentment toward Durrance for the Grand Teton incident, he had actually been impressed by his climbing, both on the North Face and on Devil’s Tower, and considered that more important than the prank. When he had finally met Jack face to face in 1938, he thought him very respectful, and he particularly liked the fact that Jack was fluent in German.

  John Randall “Jack” Durrance was born in 1912 in the heavy Floridian heat of late July. His father, John Rufus Durrance, was a school principal and his mother, America Fair Durrance, was a free and restless spirit who, after being told that the German school system was far superior to anything available in the United States, to say nothing of Florida, packed up her five young children (the youngest girl, Ada Mae, was only an infant) and traveled off to Garmisch in Bavaria. It’s not known whether she said goodbye to her husband, but it’s clear she never returned to him and instead lived the rest of her life a single mother and eccentric soul.

  Once in Germany, America Durrance set her children loose on the mountains above their village, and, learning at the heels of European masters, Jack and his younger brother Dick developed a lifelong passion for skiing and climbing. Ruggedly handsome with a shock of thick dark hair, light blue eyes, and a sardonic smile which flirted at the edge of his mouth, Jack was the epitome of a ladykiller. Wherever he went, women were never far away.

  When America and her four younger children returned to Florida in 1933, as Hitler’s Third Reich began to consume an ever larger swath of Europe, Jack stayed on in Germany to work. He began to notice that his company was quietly retooling so that it could manufacture armaments. Told to keep his mouth shut, which he did, Durrance finally decided that dangerous and irrevocable change was imminent and left Germany in 1935.

  Back in the States, he entered Dartmouth College on an athletic scholarship in skiing, awarded in part because his younger brother Dick was already a sensation at the college, winning nearly every ski race he entered, and dubbed by the New York Times “this nation’s best all-around skier.” Immediately, Jack fell into Dick’s shadow at Dartmouth. He simply didn’t have his brother’s natural talent and was often an afterthought in the glowing newspaper accounts of Dick’s shining career. He struggled academically and feared losing his scholarship once the school discovered he wasn’t the skier his brother was. Miserably, he wrote his father of a terrible insecurity, not only athletic and academic but financial as well, and that he felt shabbily dressed among his better-heeled classmates. It would be a rare confession of his deeply felt insecurities.

  Then, in October 1937, Jack received a letter from Mr. Fritz H. Wiessner. Opening it with some trepidation, expecting a rebuke for his rather ignoble theft of the North Face ascent the year before, Jack was thrilled to find it contained an introduction and congratulations on his North Face climb. Wiessner told Jack he had recommended him for a guiding job, which Jack had to politely decline because of his studies—he had already needed to work outside school so much that his grades were suffering. Still, he returned the favor by inviting Fritz to sp
eak at Dartmouth and assured him that “the door to my room [is] open at all times and I only await your letter when you will arrive in Hanover.” In following up, Fritz scheduled a slide show for the Dartmouth Mountain Club using Elizabeth Knowlton’s photos from Nanga Parbat, and asked Jack for help in organizing it. He also said he was confused about the slides and the projector and asked Jack if he knew how to insert them properly in the slots—yet another machine that baffled Fritz. Asking if he could call Fritz by his first name, Jack obliged, delighted at having been noticed by the man many Americans were calling a legendary rock climber.

  In the fall of 1938, as Fritz focused on organizing his K2 team, he realized that Jack Durrance would be a huge asset. Not only was he a gifted rock climber, he was also a seasoned mountain guide and would be able to assist Fritz with the less experienced men on the team. As a sort of test, Fritz organized a climb in the Gunks early the next month in which he, Jack and Dick Durrance, and two other hopefuls for the K2 team, Chappell “Chap” Cranmer and George Sheldon, spent a Sunday afternoon exploring the routes, many of which Fritz had pioneered. Thoroughly impressed by Jack’s climbing, Fritz invited him to join the K2 expedition. Jack was thrilled and honored by the invitation and at first accepted, but when he learned of the $2,500 fee each member had to contribute, the penurious student again had to decline; he simply didn’t have the money. Fritz told him that he would be a reserve member on the team while Fritz lobbied for funds on his behalf. Durrance was one of the few talented climbers available to join the expedition. Fritz turned to some of the deeper pockets at the American Alpine Club to help with finding funds for Jack’s fee, most notably A. Lincoln Washburn of New Haven, Connecticut, and Henry Hall, the club’s secretary and future president. Washburn apologized to Fritz that his “every available penny” was tied up in an Arctic geological trip but sent along twenty-five dollars, hoping it would help. Hall, however, took a personal interest in advancing Jack’s presence on the expedition, insisting to Joel Fisher, the club’s treasurer, that “we shouldn’t let a man as good as Durrance stay at home if it is simply a matter of funds” and suggested that this might be a case for their “white rabbit” funds. He immediately wrote a letter to several of the wealthier members suggesting a $100 contribution each.