by Ed Viesturs
The Europeans dimly recognized that the sheer altitude of the world’s highest peaks would present problems unknown in the Alps. But they developed some pretty wacky theories about how to deal with thin air. Norman Collie, Mummery’s teammate on Nanga Parbat and a mentor to Crowley, was convinced that “the only chance of getting up a big mountain was to rush it.” On the K2 expedition, Crowley wholeheartedly endorsed this absurd formula. “The only thing to do,” he wrote, “is to lay in a stock of energy, get rid of all your fat at the exact moment when you have a chance to climb a mountain, and jump back out of its reach, so to speak, before it can take its revenge.”
On the Baltoro, after many days, the expedition established a camp right at the base of what would come to be called the Abruzzi Ridge. Crowley recognized that spur as a plausible route, but now it was his turn radically to underestimate the scale and difficulty of K2. After studying the slopes above him for a full day, he concluded, as he later wrote, “that while the south face, perhaps possible theoretically, meant a complicated climb with no half-way house, there should be no difficulty in walking up the snow slopes on the east-south-east to the snowy shoulder below the final rock pyramid.”
Whew! The south face, on which Reinhold Messner would later identify the fiendish but beautiful route he called the “Magic Line,” would not be climbed until 1986. And it would be another thirty-six years after Crowley camped at the base of his “east-south-east” route that the first climbers pushed the Abruzzi Ridge as far as the Shoulder, at 26,000 feet. When they did so, it was not by “walking,” but only by virtue of some of the hardest climbing yet performed at such an altitude anywhere in the world. (Crowley’s very vocabulary betrays his dependency on the Alps as reference point: “no half-way house” sounds like a lament for the absence of a good hut in the Bernese Oberland, not for the lack of a decent tent site in the Karakoram.)
The Confessions reads like a 1,020-page I-told-you-so. On every conceivable matter, all the experts turn out to be wrong, while Crowley is proved right. But it does seem that on K2, Crowley wanted to attack his east-south-east spur, only to be overruled by Eckenstein, who insisted on turning the team’s efforts to the long and complicated northeast ridge. During the next few days, the climbers wore themselves out simply getting to the col they named “Windy Gap.” The high point reached (by the supposedly worthless Pfannl and Wessely) was estimated at 21,000 feet. But the party made no dent in the northeast ridge, a route that would not be climbed until 1978, when my friend Jim Wickwire and his three American teammates finally solved it.
The first attempt on the Abruzzi Ridge came seven years after the Crowley-Eckenstein expedition. It was led, appropriately enough, by Luigi Amedeo di Savoia-Aosta, the Duke of the Abruzzi. Though a titled nobleman and grandson of the first king of Italy, the duke became one of the greatest explorers of his era. Before turning his attention to K2, he had led brilliantly successful expeditions to Mount Saint Elias (at 18,008 feet the fourth-highest mountain in North America) in 1897 and to the unknown Ruwenzori Mountains of Africa in 1906, where he made the first ascents of all the highest peaks. He had also spearheaded an ambitious dogsled attempt on the north pole in 1900, which reached a farthest north of 86°34’, breaking the record of the great Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen by twenty-three miles.
The style of Abruzzi’s expeditions mixed opulence with efficiency. On Saint Elias, for instance, the party was made up of six Italian “amateurs” (gentleman climbers like the duke), four professional guides from Aosta, and ten porters hired in Seattle. To avoid the indignity of sleeping in direct contact with the ground, the amateurs brought along brass bedsteads, which the porters hauled fifty-five miles from the Pacific Coast to base camp. Yet high on the mountain, the team went light and fast. On July 31, 1897, all ten climbers reached the summit together. Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, would not be climbed for another sixteen years.
For K2, the Duke of the Abruzzi’s party included Filippo de Filippi, the expedition doctor, who would write the now classic account of the expedition, and four professional guides and three porters from Courmayeur, the Italian village nestled under Mont Blanc on the south side. Rounding out the team was Vittorio Sella, the finest mountain photographer of his day and one of the greatest ever. Laboriously exposing large-format glass plates and developing them in the field, Sella brought back portraits of previously unknown mountains so glorious they would inspire several generations of climbers. These were published in the lavish folio volumes that the duke produced after each of his expeditions.
Nowhere in the world did Sella find himself enclosed by such a dazzling panorama as when the 1909 team marched slowly east up the Baltoro Glacier. One by one, the peaks filed by on either side—Uli Biaho, the Cathedrals, the Trango Towers, Paiju Peak, Mustagh Tower, Chogolisa, Masherbrum, and Gasherbrum IV. Though they’re all lower than 8,000 meters, these technically severe mountains would demand the best efforts of some of the world’s top climbers from the late 1950s, through the 1980s, and they continue to lure cutting-edge alpinists today.
Long before I went to K2, I’d seen Sella’s photos of those mountains. So as Scott and I hiked up the Baltoro Glacier in 1992, I experienced a feeling of déjà vu. Even so, I had my socks knocked off by the sheer majesty of those peaks. There’s no approach to a high mountain anywhere else in the world that compares. By the time I’d finished my quest for the 8,000ers, I’d hiked up the Baltoro four times, since the approach to Broad Peak, Gasherbrum I, and Gasherbrum II is the same as the trek in to K2. Yet even on my last Baltoro march in 2003, I was still struck with wonder as I passed beneath those graceful and legendary mountains.
In 1909, the duke’s party turned north at the glacier junction called Concordia. On May 27—much earlier than most later parties would attack the mountain—they pitched a base camp at the foot of the mountain’s southeast spur. To the duke, unlike Aleister Crowley, that steep and complicated arête rising almost 9,000 feet to the Shoulder looked like anything but a walk-up. So Abruzzi postponed his attempt, while the team made a quick foray toward the northeast ridge, the route attempted by the Eckenstein-Crowley party in 1902. The guides, however, knew a hopeless route when they saw one, and quickly turned back.
On May 29, the duke, five of the Courmayeur men, and a number of Balti porters started up the southeast spur. By June 1, they had managed to establish a camp at 18,250 feet, only some 800 feet above the base of the ridge. There, however, the Balti porters saw falling rocks careening down from above and refused to carry any farther. (I can sympathize with those poor guys. They’d never been on terrain like this before in their lives. And the lower slopes on the Abruzzi Ridge feel constantly threatened by falling debris. Even on easy ground, you’re always looking up to see if anything is coming your way.)
During the next two days, some of the Courmayeur men, led by the father-and-son guides Joseph and Laurent Petigax, pushed higher. On the harder passages, they left heavy hemp ropes in place—the first fixed ropes ever strung on K2. But it became obvious to the Petigaxes that some of the pitches would be too hard for the Balti porters, even if they could be talked into giving it a go. Without porters, there was no hope of mounting a logistical pyramid toward the summit.
Discouraged, the guides turned back. At the lower camp, the duke accepted their judgment and called off the attempt. The highest point reached by the Petigaxes is uncertain, but it was probably around 21,000 feet. (Incidentally, the Italians retrieved their fixed ropes as they descended—something virtually no subsequent expeditions would ever do.)
Still, the Duke of the Abruzzi was not ready to give up on K2. Now he turned his team toward a reconnaissance of the unexplored western reaches of the mountain. Ascending the Savoia Glacier (which he named after his home stomping grounds in Italy), he tried to gain the high col from which the northwest ridge rises. After a monumental twelve-hour push of step cutting in hard ice and snow, the team reached the col, which they named Savoia Pass, at an altitud
e they measured at 21,870 feet. But there they found themselves cut off from the northwest ridge by a dangerously corniced crest. Once more, K2 turned the duke back. The mountain would not be climbed from this side until 1991.
The team still had several weeks’ worth of supplies stockpiled on the Baltoro. So the duke turned his attention to several lesser peaks. On Chogolisa, he and three of the Courmayeur guides reached an altitude that they measured at 24,275 feet. Faced with dangerous cornices and crevasses, they retreated only 850 feet short of the summit. Still, they had achieved a new record: nobody in the world had ever climbed so high. The record would stand for thirteen years, until the second British expedition to Everest bettered it in 1922.
The duke had perhaps been spoiled by his blithe successes on Saint Elias and the Ruwenzori. It came as a rude rebuff to him to be turned back on K2 nearly 6,400 feet below the summit. And so, once back in Italy, one of the strongest mountaineers in the world declared that he believed K2 would never be climbed.
That malediction took its toll. K2 would not be attempted again for twenty-nine years. In the meantime, seven expeditions did battle with Mount Everest, and six different men turned back (or, in Mallory and Irvine’s case, disappeared) above 28,000 feet, within a tantalizing thousand feet of the summit.
By 1938 on K2, no one had succeeded in climbing above 21,870 feet. On neither the 1902 nor the 1909 expedition had anyone really come to grips with the challenge. All the mountain’s ultimate defenses remained unknown.
Beginning in the mid-1930s, the American Alpine Club (AAC) repeatedly petitioned the government of Kashmir for a permit for a K2 expedition. In those days, climbing in America lagged far behind the standards set by British, French, German, Italian, Swiss, and Austrian climbers. But in 1936, four young American climbers, all of them graduates of Harvard, joined up with four more senior (and more famous) Brits to make the first ascent of Nanda Devi, a beautiful and difficult 25,643-foot mountain in northern India. At the time, it was the highest summit reached anywhere in the world—a record that would stand for another fourteen years, until the French climbed Annapurna in 1950.
Out of the party of eight, only two—the Englishmen H. W. Tilman and Noel Odell—reached the summit. The strongest American was Charlie Houston, a twenty-two-year-old graduate student at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Despite his youth, Houston had climbed in the Alps as a teenager and was already the veteran of two major Alaskan expeditions, including the first ascent of Mount Foraker, the second-highest peak in the Alaska Range. Houston was chosen for the summit party on Nanda Devi, but the night before the assault he came down with a terrible case of food poisoning, and Tilman took his place.
When permission for K2 finally came through, in 1937, the AAC offered the leadership of the expedition to Fritz Wiessner, a German-American from Dresden who had immigrated to the States in 1929 and gained citizenship in 1935. Wiessner was without a doubt the finest American climber of his day. After putting up new routes on several of the hardest faces in the Alps, he had bagged some of the great prizes in North America, including the first ascent of Mount Waddington, the rugged and intricate peak that is the highest summit in the stormy Coast Range of British Columbia, which had defeated sixteen previous attempts. Wiessner was also the only American with experience on an 8,000-meter peak, as he had served on the 1932 German expedition to Nanga Parbat, where he was one of three climbers to reach a high point of 23,000 feet.
Wiessner ran his own successful chemistry business in Vermont, specializing in the manufacture of ski wax. By the time the AAC got permission for K2, he was too bogged down in business obligations to go to the Karakoram the next summer, so he recommended that the expedition be turned over to Charlie Houston. Oddly enough, that magnanimous referral would be the spark for a lifelong, often bitter antipathy between Houston and Wiessner.
Houston leapt at the chance to lead the expedition. But from the start, he harbored the suspicion that Wiessner had a hidden agenda. The permit the AAC had obtained was good for two years; if the 1938 expedition failed to get up K2, Americans could organize another crack at the mountain for 1939.
Houston’s first choice for the team was Bob Bates, a good friend of his from Harvard, himself a veteran of two Alaskan expeditions. In February 1938, Bates wrote a letter to another Harvard crony in which he voiced the fears he and Houston already entertained: “Weissner’s [sic] idea, I suppose, is to have us do the reconnaissance + possibly the dirty work + then go in next year and profit by our mistakes. This is pretty surely it, but keep it to yourself.”
Houston put together a strong team. Besides Bates, the climbers included Bill House, Wiessner’s partner on the Waddington first ascent; Richard Burdsall, who had reached the summit of the remote and lofty Minya Konka in western China in 1932; and Paul Petzoldt. Houston, Bates, Burdsall, and House were all easterners and Ivy League graduates—the first three had gone to Harvard, House to Yale. Petzoldt not only hadn’t gone to college, he was a cowboy from Wyoming. But he was also one of the strongest climbers in the country, having pioneered some of the hardest routes in the Tetons, where he worked part-time as a guide. In terms of rock-climbing skills, Petzoldt was way ahead of his eastern teammates.
The sixth member of the party, invited from afar, was Captain Norman Streatfeild, a British officer living in India who had already been on numerous hunting, mapping, and climbing trips to the Karakoram. Streatfeild was not the mountaineering equal of the five Americans, but he would prove invaluable in terms of logistics and dealing with native porters.
When I was still a teenager, long before I’d climbed any peaks myself, I’d read Houston and Bates’s classic K2: The Savage Mountain, about the 1953 expedition. I’d loved the book, because it told the story of how adversity transformed a team into an ideal brotherhood; along with Annapurna, K2: The Savage Mountain had a lot to do with turning me into a mountaineer. But it was not until Scott and I started preparing for our own K2 adventure in 1992 that I read the book about the earlier American expedition.
Five Miles High is a collaborative effort: five of its chapters were written by Bates, five by Houston, four by House, three by Burdsall—and none by Petzoldt. It’s a delightful book, the kind of tale that makes you nostalgic for a vanished era of exploration. It also subscribes firmly to the tradition of keeping the expedition’s dirty laundry far from the eyes of the public. There are tongue-in-cheek gibes about certain members’ habits and foibles (for example, about how much Petzoldt liked to eat), but you’d hardly know that a harsh word or dispute occurred within the team. And there is not the slightest hint of the Wiessner-Houston tension that would explode inside the AAC after 1939.
Houston admits in the first chapter that the Duke of the Abruzzi’s dark prediction still hung over the mountain. “So formidable are the few approaches to its summit,” he writes, “that many climbers have felt the ascent to be impossible.” Houston also baldly declares that the 1938 expedition was conceived as a reconnaissance:
Could we determine which route offered most possibility of success, perhaps a later expedition, unhampered by the need of reconnoitering the mountain, might hope to reach the top. Ours then was to be a preliminary attack whose main plan was to find a way for a later party.
But then he coyly closes the chapter:
We were to examine three main ridges, separated by miles of glacier travel, and to decide which of the three would be most likely to furnish a route to the summit. Finally, given time, weather, and the smile of fortune, we were to try to reach that distant point.
All through the winter and spring before the expedition, the climbers ordered gear and tested food supplies. When you read about the provisions those men took to K2 in 1938, you realize they were closer not only in time but in style to the great Arctic and Antarctic expeditions of the turn of the twentieth century than to our present-day mountaineering jaunts. For instance, the ‘38 climbers brought along fifty pounds of pemmican made in Denmark. Almost nobody
eats pemmican anymore, but it was the staple of nineteenth-century explorers. Pemmican is a gooey mixture of dried meat, animal fat, sugar, rice, and raisins. It keeps well in the cold, and it’s very high in calories. I have to confess, though, that I’ve never had a single bite of the stuff. We know now that while pemmican may be great in the Arctic or the Antarctic, it’s way too fatty to digest at high altitudes.
The 1938 team tried out dozens of kinds of biscuits and hard bread. They tested them by dropping them out of a second-floor window and by leaving them out in the rain overnight. They finally chose one brand of biscuit because, as Bates wrote, it “tasted good and resisted moisture, yet needed no sledge hammer to break it.” Bates’s team also swore by some of the first dried vegetables and fruits available, all of them produced by what their makers called a “secret process.” The ‘38 team’s cereals included Cream of Wheat and Maltex. Like all expeditions of their time, the team considered it absolutely essential to bring along large quantities of Klim (“milk” spelled backward)—powdered whole milk, which is almost impossible to find in a market nowadays. On all my expeditions, coffee has been a vital base camp drink. The 1938 climbers brought tea instead (I do drink sweet, milky tea up high), because they considered coffee too much of a nuisance to brew in the field.
When I look over that K2 food list, I’m struck by how bulky and heavy their provisions were. But then I have to remind myself that they were outfitting in an age long before prepackaged dried foods came on the market, or Power Bars or Pop-Tarts, or instant soups, or tubes of high-energy gel. The kinds of lightweight, easy-to-fix meals we relied on in 1992 simply weren’t available in 1938. On the other hand, those guys had luxuries we never dreamed of. In Askole, for example, they hired a hefty porter with a huge, straw-lined wicker basket for a backpack, in which he managed to carry twenty dozen fresh eggs to base camp without breaking them!
