by Ed Viesturs
As part of my homework for K2, I had studied all the things that had gone wrong on previous expeditions on the Abruzzi Ridge. In particular, I’d learned a sobering lesson from the 1986 tragedy. On their descent, a number of climbers that year had been marooned on the Shoulder during a long storm. One reason some of them didn’t seize the lulls in the storm to head down was that they were afraid of losing the route. And the reason for that was that they had not adequately wanded the stretch from Camp III to Camp IV.
“Willow wands” are ordinary garden stakes painted green, with little red ribbons attached to one end. On the way up, if you plant a wand in the snow every hundred feet or so, you’re marking the route so that you can find it even in a whiteout on the way down. I’d been trained on Rainier and Denali always to wand a route.
Thus I’d been stunned to learn that the climbers marooned on the Shoulder in 1986 simply had not brought enough willow wands to mark the route on the featureless white expanse below Camp IV. On a nice sunny day, it’s hard to imagine the need for those markers. But I’d always been taught to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Wanding doesn’t seem to be a European thing—it’s not quite chic to be seen lugging a pack with dozens of green sticks protruding from the top flap. Even the Russians on our trip had not bothered to wand the route above Camp III.
Now, on the way up from Camp III to Camp IV, I placed wands at regular intervals. I knew that this stretch was the most likely place for us to get lost on the way down. As I climbed, I kept repeating to myself, “Remember ‘86!” It wasn’t easy, since we had lost a bunch of wands when the tents were buried. In the end, as I began to run out, I had to break many of the wands in half and plant them short to eke out our supply. We had even scrounged tent poles from broken tents at Camp III to use as wands. Several days later, those markers would save our asses.
Scott and I reached Camp IV at 2:00 P.M. Once again the others straggled in hours later, some as late as 8:00 P.M. I’d deliberately placed our campsite as high on the Shoulder as was feasible, to shorten the climb on summit day. Now we all settled in to wait. In this incarnation, Camp IV was a small cluster of freshly erected and newly occupied tents. Charley Mace was camped just below us. In various tents were the members of Hall & Ball’s team: Rob and Gary, two Swedish climbers, and the three Mexicans.
Scott and I had also chosen to go superlight. Our tent was not a regular two-man model but a five-pound bivy tent. We had only one sleeping bag to share between the two of us. The idea was to sleep in our down suits, with the bag unzipped and draped over us like a blanket. In the claustrophobic confines of our cramped tent, we thought, this arrangement should keep us warm enough.
Our only rope was the fifty-foot line I had scavenged at Camp III. All of the rope we had originally brought had either been fixed in place or lost in the intervening storms.
That evening, August 13, Scott and I planned to get up at 10:30 P.M. and be out the door by midnight. But I knew better than to count on perfect weather for the next day. As I wrote in my diary—presciently, it turned out—”Weather is so fickle on K2 the only way to get good weather is to go high & wait it out. That’s our plan. Hang out here @ CIV until it looks good enough to go.”
The days that followed severely tried our patience. Scott and I got up to check the weather at 10:30 P.M., then again at midnight, 3:30 A.M., and 5:30 A.M. Each time we stuck our heads out the tent door, we saw that it was blowing hard and snowing—too nasty for a summit attempt. We had decided that if we could not take off by 5:30 A.M., it would be too late to get to the summit and back with a margin of safety. Once we’d made up our minds not to go on August 14, we simply lay in our cramped tent, trying to make the hours pass. “Dozed all day,” I wrote in my diary. “Didn’t eat shit. Try again tonight.”
During our time at Camp IV, we tried to yell over the wind to let the others know our plans. All of Hall & Ball’s team, including the Swedes and the Mexicans, were now intermittently using their bottled oxygen even while they slept. That made for a cruel trade-off: the longer they hung out at Camp IV, the less oxygen they’d have left to go to the summit with. We weren’t surprised, then, in the middle of the day on August 14, when two of the Mexicans, Ricardo Torres-Nava and Adrián Benítez, decided to bail. They were experienced climbers—both had topped out on Everest—so we figured they wouldn’t have any trouble getting down to Camp III.
What happened on their descent we learned about only secondhand, over the radio from Dan Mazur and Jonathan Pratt, two of our teammates who were still at Camp III. The news shocked us badly, but I’m disturbed, upon rereading my diary, to see that I recorded it at the time with more outrage than compassion:
Apparently they tried to do a ski pole rappel (stupid!) @ the traverse & Adrian pulled it out & fell 3000’ to near CII—he’s dead! Idiots! Dan & Jonathan tried to get to him but it was too dangerous.
Below the Shoulder, at about 25,500 feet, there was a small ice step. Rather than downclimb it, Ricardo and Adrián set up a rappel. Despite having gotten up Everest, the two Mexicans apparently weren’t very technically skilled. As the anchor for their rappel, they simply thrust a ski pole into the slope. Even in the most desperate situation, that would have been an incredibly foolish thing to try. In fact, I’d never before heard of anybody trying to rappel off a ski pole. Ricardo got away with it, but when Adrián put his weight on the rope, the pole pulled. He never had a chance to stop himself. Even though they were sure he was dead, Jonathan and Dan spent the better part of two days trying to get to Adrián’s body; eventually they decided that it was so hazardous, they would be inviting another accident.
I’d guess now that the tone of my diary entry reflected the weeks of tension and frustration that had built up inside me by mid-August. The accident showed how close to the edge some of the climbers were on this unforgiving mountain. Adrián was a friendly and likable guy, and we were all saddened by his death. But the accident was entirely avoidable. He could have easily faced in and downclimbed the steep step where he fell; he didn’t need to rappel.
That’s where my anger came from. I’d been on the mountain too long with other climbers who weren’t even my teammates, let alone my friends, and whose judgment and technique I didn’t trust. What’s more, the irritation in my diary must have been a defense: I didn’t want this needless tragedy to undermine in any way my own determination to climb K2. Had it been Scott or Charley who had died, more than likely I would have given up my attempt.
August 15 came and went with no improvement in the weather. That day, having run out of bottled oxygen, the Swedes bailed, and the third Mexican, Héctor Ponce de León, descended to console his surviving teammate. So now there were only five of us left at Camp IV: Hall & Ball, Charley, Scott, and me. We had to pass the hours resting and daydreaming. My mind was filled with anxious thoughts: How strong would I be during the final ascent after surviving here for two or three days? Would the weather finally break? Could we get up to the summit and back before nightfall, as no one this season had yet done?
My diary entry that day is a testament to uneasiness:
Tried again last night & no go. Still funky weather. Barely eating. We either go up tonight or bail down tomorrow….
Weather is OK. Not great. Cloudy, no wind, poor visibility. We seem to be at the top edge of clouds. Very anxious. Tonight we must go up or go down tomorrow & start all over—ugh! I want to get this over with! We snooze all day like coon-hounds. Dreaming of food—salad, beer, pizza.
That line about going down and starting all over again, I now realize, was pure rationalization. All five of us knew this was going to be our last chance that summer to climb K2.
On August 16, Scott and I were up at midnight. It was still cloudy, but calm, so we decided to go for it. Breakfast was a cup of coffee apiece. Altitude deprives you of hunger, and forcing yourself to eat can stir up waves of nausea. It’s one of the paradoxes of high-altitude climbing that even though you are burning thousands of calories each da
y, you simply cannot get enough back into your system to balance things out.
We had slept in our down suits, so it was just a matter of putting on boots, overboots, harnesses, mittens, hats, goggles, and headlamps. Ice that had coated the inside walls of our confining tent showered us as we tried not to elbow each other. Finally we were out the door. We strapped on our crampons and were moving by 1:30 A.M. Charley didn’t get off for another hour, and Rob and Gary were even further behind.
I wasn’t carrying a pack, just two liter bottles filled with a powdered energy drink; in my chest pockets I’d stuck a couple of Power Bars. I also carried a spare pair of mittens, a camera, and extra headlamp batteries. Scott and I were roped together with our fifty-foot line, in anticipation of the crevasses that we knew lay above.
The slope gradually steepened as we headed up into the mouth of the Bottleneck. We kicked steps in the firm snow, inclined at a 45-degree angle. Following in our tracks, Charley caught up to us in the Bottleneck. During the whole expedition so far, Scott and I had scarcely climbed with Charley, but in that instant he became our partner. We managed to tie in all three of us on that fifty-foot rope, which was almost absurd, yet roping up together gave us a certain feeling of security.
Near the top of the Bottleneck, the snow conditions worsened, alternating deep, soft powder with a scary breakable crust. We swapped leads often.
We’d been climbing for two hours before we finally saw Rob and Gary’s headlamps as they left Camp IV. Despite that late start, and despite using supplemental oxygen, they were moving very slowly. Was something wrong?
At the top of the Bottleneck, we began the leftward traverse, the crux of the whole route. Vlad had fixed a 150-foot rope here on August 1, and it was still in place—the single fixed rope on the mountain above Camp IV. It was anchored, with a pair of ice screws, only at either end, so if you came off in the middle of the traverse, you’d take a horrendous yo-yo plunge before the stretchy nylon rope would catch you—assuming that neither of the anchors pulled. All the same, we clipped in to the rope and used it like a handrail, counting on what climbers jokingly call “psychological” protection.
The traverse was sketchy. The points of our crampons barely gained purchase on the downward-sloping slabs of rock that lay just beneath the sugary snow. Falling was not an option, but staying attached to the face took all the concentration we could muster.
By shortly after sunrise, we were past the traverse and had started up the long diagonal ramp that leads to the summit snowfield. We were still more than a thousand feet below the top, with some five or six hours of climbing ahead of us, but we knew that the ground only got easier above. Things were looking really positive.
All morning, however, a sea of clouds below us had been slowly but steadily rising. At 7:00 A.M., the sea engulfed us. It was still completely calm, and eerily warm—so warm that I took off my hat. But then it started to snow; the big, soft, fluffy flakes quickly grew so thick that I started inhaling them as I panted in the thin air. We were still roped together, because even on the summit snowfield there are crevasses you could fall into. We continued to swap leads as we plowed through the breakable crust.
As we trudged slowly upward in silence, I started calculating. Five hours to the summit, three back down to here—what are conditions going to be like eight hours from now if it keeps snowing? It was then that the knot started to form in my gut. As I later wrote in my diary, I was wondering, “What to do? The prudent thing is to turn back, but we keep going. Stupid? Probably. This is the worst part of climbing big peaks. Spend tons of $ & time to get to this point & you’re faced with this decision.”
Scott and Charley obviously weren’t going through the same kind of agonizing appraisal. When I finally stopped them and asked, “Hey, what do you guys think?,” Scott answered, “Whaddya mean?” and Charlie seconded him: “We’re going up!”
So I kept heading upward, putting off my decision from one half hour to the next. I thought, Why are they comfortable with this and I’m not? Am I a sissy? Do I worry too much? Am I too conservative? All that ambivalence, all that self-questioning just ate away at me, and the knot in my gut grew heavier.
As we got closer to the summit and the falling snow showed no signs of letting up, I knew I was making the greatest mistake of my climbing life. And yet I kept going.
During the seventeen years since K2, I’ve thought long and hard about why I didn’t turn around on August 16, 1992. There was certainly a voice in my head taunting me: What are other people going to say if I go down while Scott and Charley make the summit? Yet today I can honestly state that my partners’ eagerness to push ahead was not what swayed me. It was, instead, my perverse inability to make a decision. In my head at the time, a broken record was playing: I wish I didn’t have to make this decision right now. This is the worst decision in the world.
What happened to me in 2002 on Annapurna gave me much-needed clarity about what had gone on a decade earlier on K2. On May 14 of that year, J.-C. Lafaille and Alberto Iñurrategi completed an exposed and dangerous snow-and-ice traverse under a tower called the Roc Noir, then began climbing the steep face to regain the crest of the east ridge. Coming along a little behind the lead pair, Veikka Gustafsson and I reached the traverse at 7:30 A.M. I started to lead across, but I realized at once that the slope was loaded with snow ready to slide. All it might take to trigger a fatal avalanche was somebody kicking steps in the unstable surface.
J.-C., the most talented climber I had ever paired up with, had led the traverse, but I balked. He kept yelling down to us how dangerous the conditions were—a fact that was already obvious to me. Torn by conflicting impulses, I remembered being in a similar predicament in 1992. This time a voice in my head warned me, Ed, don’t do now what you did on K2. I turned back, and without hesitation Veikka turned back with me. J.-C. and Alberto pushed on to the summit, but they had a true epic getting down. It was only after they had reversed the traverse under the Roc Noir that they, as J.-C. would later write, “once more entered the land of the living.”
That was the only time on my thirty expeditions to 8,000ers that I ever turned back while a partner went on. But I’ve never second-guessed my decision. The sense that I’d made the right choice helped me congratulate J.-C. and Alberto on their triumph with unalloyed joy and admiration. I believed they had just pulled off one of the most daring ascents in recent mountaineering history. By 2002, I was comfortable with the notion that someone like J.-C. might tread a thinner line of acceptable risk than I would.
On August 16, 1992, Scott, Charley, and I broke free of the clouds just short of the summit. We saw it shining in the sun ahead of us. At noon, we stood on top, hugging each other and gasping in the thin air. My elation was genuine, but it was tempered by a mounting anxiety as I stared at the boiling black clouds below us. After only thirty minutes on top, we headed down.
Almost immediately we plunged back into that sea of clouds, which was now darker and more ominous than ever. Soon we were stumbling downward in a thick whiteout. It was then that Scott, in the lead, started to head off in the wrong direction, toward the top of the unknown east face. On the way up, I’d memorized even the subtlest landmarks, and now I was able to shout, “No, no, no! Wrong way, Scott! Farther to the right!”
By the time we got to the ramp that led down to the Bottleneck, the snow conditions were appalling. Most of the drifts were thigh-deep, and as I broke trail, I kept knocking loose huge slabs that thundered out of sight into the void below. By now, I was convinced that we were going to die. I kept telling myself that I’d probably just made the last and most stupid mistake of my life. That realization brought with it a weird sense of calm: Well, you might as well give it your best effort. You’ve got nothing to lose now.
At last we reached the near end of the crux traverse. There was no hope of reversing the pitch in the footsteps we had kicked on the way up—they were lost under layers of deep new snow. Instead, one by one we rappelled the fixed rope unt
il we reached its sagging midpoint, then jumared back up to the farther anchor. From there, at the top of the Bottleneck, we faced in and started to kick steps downward. We were un-roped, since we knew that if one guy fell here, the rope would also pull the other two off.
Miraculously, none of the snow slabs broke loose beneath our feet. We downclimbed slowly, until at last the angle gentled out where the summit pyramid meets the Shoulder. By now, the whiteout was so thick, we couldn’t see Camp IV. So we spread out, three abreast, and clomped on down, like searchers looking for clues in a crime scene in the forest. When we got to the top of the Shoulder, we started calling out, hoping Rob and Gary could guide us into camp. At last they heard us and shouted back.
We reached the tents at 5:00 P.M. We’d been climbing for almost sixteen hours.
I sat down in the snow outside our bivy tent. At that moment, I felt no happiness whatsoever at having climbed K2. Instead, I felt only anger at myself. That very evening, I wrote in my diary, “We’d pushed our luck beyond the max. I hope I never do that again! No summit is worth dying for. You can always come back.”
K2 was not done messing with us. As we’d reached Camp IV, I’d asked Rob, “What happened to you guys?”
A stricken look had crossed his face. “Gary’s pretty sick,” he’d said softly.
That morning, Rob and Gary had barely gotten started when Gary collapsed with severe breathing problems. It was all Rob could do to get his partner back to camp. Throughout the day, as he lay in the tent, Gary’s condition steadily worsened. Eventually we would conclude that he had a bad case of pulmonary edema.
Exhausted though we were, Scott, Charley, and I would now have to get a nearly helpless climber down the mountain. It would have been tempting to take a rest day on August 17, but I knew better. I wrote in my diary, “We gotta get outta here. Don’t want to get trapped here & die like all those people in ’86…. This mountain is gonna kick our ass all the way down.”
