K2

by Ed Viesturs

  I’ve never met Charlie Houston, but I’ve admired him ever since, as a teenager, I read K2: The Savage Mountain. And that decision is one of the things for which I admire him most. No matter how headstrong he may have been, he was incredibly loyal to his teammates. He supported them to the utmost on the expedition, and praised them to the skies afterward. Mountaineers—especially good ones—can be pretty coldhearted people. But Houston seems to have been full of compassion and empathy. And in a case like this, he was willing to give up a goal he had dreamed about for a year to try to nurse a teammate back to health.

  So the rest of the party pushed ahead. For the first time, they marched beneath the savage pyramids of K2’s outliers, peaks that somehow seemed familiar, since they had seen them in Vittorio Sella’s magnificent photographs. At Paiju, “the last little island of vegetation,” as Bates put it, they turned a corner and saw ahead of them “the gray back of the Baltoro Glacier, looking like a huge reptile.” In 1992, we found Paiju a bit squalid, since so many other expeditions had camped and left their trash there over the years. When I passed through again in 2003, on the way to Broad Peak, I saw that some Pakistani environmental agency had built outhouses and concrete washbasins in an effort to clean the place up. Still, Paiju will always be a memorable camp for me, because it was here on our 1992 approach that Scott and I took a full rest day, during which we hiked up a wooded hill to a rocky ridge and got that stunning first view of K2.

  The 1938 team clambered onto the snout of the Baltoro. The mood of Bates’s writing at this point is uncharacteristically gloomy. He describes “the dismal, boulder-strewn surface” of the permanent ice and remarks, “An air of death and decay hung over this part of the glacier.” No doubt the men’s spirits were dampened by the absence of Houston and Petzoldt, but even today, the lower stretches of the Baltoro make for tedious hiking. You have to wind in and out and up and down through what Bates called “mounds and ridges of loose debris.” Oddly enough, although you’re on a glacier, the daytime heat is blistering, and the ground is dry and dusty. In ‘92, we hiked here in shorts, shading ourselves with umbrellas but sweating like dogs the whole way.

  Of their first couple of days on the Baltoro Glacier, Bates writes, “For us the uncertain footing was little more than irritating, but for our coolies, with straw or goat-skin moccasins, the passage was severe.” Instead of ice axes, each porter wielded a “coolie crutch,” a wooden device stout enough to cut steps in the ice which also served as a tripod on which to rest one’s load.

  On June 8, the team camped at Urdukas, a beautiful grassy oasis just off the glacier on the southern side. For centuries, Balti herdsmen have driven their flocks to Urdukas to graze, but that’s as close as most of them ever got to K2, and since you can’t see the mountain from that patch of greenery, that may explain why K2 scarcely has a native name. In 1992, it was still a lovely place; you could lounge in the grass and get out of the sun in the shade of large boulders that have come to rest there.

  The whole hike in to K2 is utterly different from the approaches to 8,000ers in Nepal. If you’re hiking in to Everest on the south side, you pass through villages with tea shops and even restaurants. Your Sherpa take off each night to go visit their cousins, then show up in the morning. The whole thing feels very civilized. On the much more difficult approach to K2, there are no villages—or even isolated houses—after Askole. You’re camping out with the porters, most of the time on the glacier. Yet however stark or tedious it may seem at times, that forty-mile approach up the Baltoro is beautiful in its own right.

  In 1938, while the men were loafing at Urdukas, Pasang Kikuli suddenly pointed west down the glacier and shouted, “Sahibs, sahibs, look see!” Through binoculars, the two black dots the Sherpa had spotted proved to be Petzoldt and Houston hiking along at a furious pace. “How in the world did he do it?” Burdsall exclaimed.

  “Charlie fixed me up,” Petzoldt muttered as soon as he had joined his teammates. “How is the food holding out?”

  Four days later, the climbers reached base camp. Streatfeild paid off the porters, who were eager to charge back down the glacier as soon as they could, then gave the head man a pouch containing forty-five stones. “Throw away one stone every day,” he said. “When they are all gone, come back to meet us.”

  Now the team had six weeks to reconnoiter K2 and, if there was still time, to try to climb it. But the next seventeen days amounted to a prolonged exercise in futility. The climbers’ first views of the Abruzzi Ridge were not encouraging. On a foray up the Godwin Austen Glacier, Bates and Streatfeild had scrutinized the slopes rising above them. They’d reported that the south face proper looked impossible, while the Abruzzi Ridge presented continuously steep ice gullies and rock ribs all the way up to the Shoulder, more than 8,000 feet above the base.

  Dividing into subgroups, the team reconnoitered the Savoia Glacier in an effort to reach both Savoia Pass, and thus the beginning of the northwest ridge, and the Godwin Austen Glacier, toward the start of the northeast ridge. On three separate efforts spread across two weeks, various members failed even to get to Savoia Pass, as they were turned back by crevasses and ice cliffs. These were humiliating setbacks—how could a passage that the Courmayeur guides had pioneered twenty-nine years earlier stump some of America’s best mountaineers? The men rationalized that conditions must have changed radically since 1909, but privately they nursed the fear that they weren’t strong enough to meet the challenge.

  One reason for the dogged effort to attack the northwest ridge sprang from an observation first made by the Duke of the Abruzzi. From Savoia Pass, he had seen that the rock strata on the northwest ridge inclined upward, promising staircase-like steps. On the southeast spur on the diametrically opposite side of the mountain, the Italians found just the reverse: downward-sloping slabs and ledges that made for treacherous climbing and insecure campsites.

  On the Matterhorn in the early 1860s, the great British climber Edward Whymper had made six attempts on the southwest ridge, failing at increasingly higher points. Finally Whymper attacked the steeper northeast ridge, by which he succeeded in making the first ascent, on July 14, 1865. The difference was entirely due to the angle of the rock strata that composed the core of the mountain: upward-tilting on the northeast, downward-sloping on the southwest.

  Whymper’s hard-won lesson was famous in mountaineering annals. The Duke of the Abruzzi intended to take the same advantage of the angle of the strata on K2, as did his successors in 1938. But in this case, the mountain fooled everybody. The northwest ridge would not be climbed for another fifty-three years.

  During the two weeks of reconnoitering, the weather was consistently stormy. Fortunately, the team had had the foresight to bring willow wands, apparently at Bob Bates’s insistence. On previous expeditions in Canada and Alaska—especially his amazing first ascent of Mount Lucania with Bradford Washburn in 1937 and his traverse of the Saint Elias Range two years earlier—Bates had learned just how vital wands could be. The type the 1938 party used was a three-foot-long wooden dowel, one end of which was painted black to about seven inches from the head. After a retreat in a snowstorm on the Savoia Glacier, Bill House wrote, “We were glad we had brought Bates’s black-painted wood dowels to mark the trail home, for to get lost on that part of the glacier would have meant a night out or worse.”

  To add to the woes of these discouraging days, Petzoldt suffered from several recurrences of his fever. Even at base camp, he would shiver for hours, unable to get warm despite wearing all his clothing inside his sleeping bag. The only treatment his baffled teammates could offer was to brew up one hot drink after another and to “take turns rubbing his back.”

  As their efforts simply to get to the starting points on the northeast and northwest ridges failed, the team members kept studying the Abruzzi Ridge. From certain places on the Godwin Austen Glacier, they could see beyond the 26,000-foot Shoulder to the summit pyramid. It’s fascinating to rediscover, in Five Miles High, the first desc
ription ever published of the massive hanging serac at 27,000 feet that I would nickname the Motivator, the collapse of which would cause so much of the tragedy in 2008. House wrote,

  Partway up this [summit] cone is a great hanging glacier which sweeps the upper part of the northeast ridge as well as one corner of the Abruzzi ridge. Care would be needed in crossing the plateau from this last ridge, but it looked as though it could be done safely.

  On June 28, the team gathered at base camp for what expeditioneers like to call a “council of war.” Only two members—Petzoldt and House—favored an attack on the Abruzzi Ridge. Houston and Burdsall argued for yet another attempt to reach the northeast ridge. Bates and Streatfeild were neutral.

  During the next several days, the climbers made a couple of very tentative thrusts up the lower slopes of the Abruzzi. On one of them, Houston and House discovered a few wooden sticks, which they realized had to be debris from the Duke of the Abruzzi’s boxes. They had reached the highest point to which the Italians had managed to haul supplies, and were now only 500 feet below the cliff where the Courmayeur guides had turned back in 1909. Like the Italians, the Americans recognized immediately that the biggest problem with the Abruzzi was the lack of suitable campsites. As House put it,

  To have found such a long stretch on the ridge devoid of any places where tent platforms could be built and reached by loaded men was serious. It seemed to close up the last avenue of hope we had had for finding a route on K2. On top of this setback, one of our strongest climbers was ill.

  One of the things that I most respect about the 1938 team is that after all their setbacks, they didn’t simply pack up and go home. By July 2, when House and Petzoldt made the first real stab at the Abruzzi, the party had been in the field for fifty-two days since they had started hiking from Srinagar. They had worn themselves out reconnoitering K2, without as yet deciding which route might go. It would have been tempting to throw in the towel and leave the solution to a 1939 expedition.

  There’s a memorable passage in one of House’s chapters revealing just how far morale had plunged, and how thoughts of home were tugging at each of the climbers:

  The expedition spirits were now at very low ebb. From one side of the mountain to the other we had been unable to find a route. Two weeks had been spent apparently to no other purpose than to convince us that no way we had seen was possible…. Every one of us would have liked to be clear of the whole business right then.

  Had we been able to spend an afternoon relaxing at the seashore or getting very drunk, we might have realized that two weeks of reconnaissance on a mountain as big as K2 could not possibly be conclusive…. At that time, however, it seemed as though each succeeding judgment had been upheld by later checking and that there was no hope at all. Unfortunately the seashore was a thousand miles away and our supply of rum far too slender to indulge in as an escape.

  In a letter home written about this time, Houston gave voice to his deep pessimism. “This is a bigger, harder mountain than any of us realized before,” he wrote, “and it will take a better party than ours a much longer time than we have left, in order to get anywhere at all.”

  On July 2, Petzoldt (whose feverish fits alternated with startling recoveries) and House started up the Abruzzi, determined to find a campsite. They had almost given up hope when Petzoldt crawled around a corner and found a tiny but perfect saddle in the ridge, protected from the wind and falling rocks and just big enough for several tents. The next day, the whole team, including the Sherpa, packed loads up to that saddle and established Camp II at 19,300 feet. (Camp I had been placed at the base of the Abruzzi, a bit below the site of our advance base camp in 1992.)

  Studying the two photos of Camp II published in Five Miles High, I can see why this site looked like a godsend—an oasis of safety in the middle of a vast and dangerous slope. But I don’t even remember passing that little saddle on the spur. We didn’t pitch our first camp on the ridge until we’d reached 20,000 feet. Starting in the 1980s, climbers realized that the best way to deal with the scarcity of tent sites on the Abruzzi was to pitch camps as far apart as possible. There are all kinds of reasons, some of them psychological, why this wasn’t feasible for the 1938 team.

  Even before they had really gotten launched on the Abruzzi, the team suffered an absurd but monumental misfortune. At Camp I, they had cached a four-gallon gas can, containing a substantial portion of the team’s entire supply of stove fuel. To keep it out of the sun, the men had tucked the can underneath an overhanging rock embedded in the glacial ice. During the next day, the ice melted, causing the rock to topple on top of the can and smash it, spilling the entire contents.

  This disaster meant that throughout the rest of the expedition, the climbers would have to be extremely frugal in rationing their fuel. The situation was so dire that Streatfeild, two Sherpa, and the expedition cook decided at once to hike to the base of Gasherbrum I. Streatfield had been with the French team that had attempted that mountain in 1936, and he remembered that the climbers had left unused gas cached there upon their departure. But he also remembered that after the French had gone home, the “coolies” had returned to scavenge what they could.

  If he could find no gas beneath Gasherbrum I, Streatfeild planned to resort to a truly desperate expedient. He would send one Sherpa and the cook all the way down to Askole, a seven-day march, to recruit porters to pack huge loads of firewood all the way back up the Baltoro! “This could be used at our Base Camp and possibly higher,” House wrote, “instead of the now precious liquid fuel.”

  In the end, Streatfeild’s splinter group hiked more than twenty miles to the French base camp—down the Godwin Austen Glacier to Concordia, then up the Upper Baltoro and the South Gasherbrum glaciers. At the French camp, which had indeed been looted by the porters, they found not a single ounce of stove fuel. They did scavenge some canned meat and vegetables, which ultimately gave the team’s cuisine welcome variety. And, true to his promise, Streatfeild sent one Sherpa, Pemba Kitar, and the cook, Ahdoo, off to Askole to gather firewood. Amazingly, those two returned only eight days later from a trek that normally took fourteen days, accompanied by ten porters carrying massive loads of “fine cedar.” Though it was never used above base camp, the firewood solved the expedition’s fuel problem.

  Meanwhile, throughout the first ten days of July, the climbers pushed the route and carried loads up the Abruzzi. To safeguard the harder passages, the men fixed ropes—lines made of three-eighths-inch-diameter hemp, 1,700 feet of which the team had purchased in Bombay. Here the pitons Petzoldt had smuggled into the expedition gear proved invaluable as anchors for the ropes. Nowadays, on steep terrain, we use jumars, mechanical ascenders with which we attach ourselves to nylon fixed ropes. These metal devices slide easily up the rope, but catch and hold fast under a downward pull. In 1938, ascenders were still a quarter century away from being invented. Instead, the climbers tied knots and overhand loops in their hemp fixed ropes, then simply hauled themselves up with their hands.

  Descending the steeper passages today, we clip our harnesses to the fixed rope with a figure-eight device and rappel the line. In 1938, the climbers also rappelled, but they did so with the traditional dulfersitz, a simple and ingenious method of wrapping the rope in an S-bend through the crotch, around one hip, up across the chest, and over the opposite shoulder, invented shortly after the turn of the twentieth century by the great German climber Hans Dülfer. On the hike in, Petzoldt had taught the Sherpa how to rappel. Now they employed this vital technique on high-angle terrain above thousand-foot drops with all the aplomb of the Americans.

  Throughout this surge, in fact, three Sherpa—Pasang Kikuli, Phinsoo, and Tse Tendrup—played a crucial role, as they carried the bulk of the loads and did most of the work building up tent platforms by stacking loose rocks on sloping ledges.

  On July 5, the team established Camp III at 20,700 feet. Camp IV was pitched only 800 feet higher on July 13. For the first time, hope outweighed discourag
ement in the climbers’ hearts.

  On my own expeditions, I’ve always found that it’s during the storm days, when you lie around inside your tent and try to kill time, that the tensions among team members tend to escalate. Confined in a small space, elbow to elbow with another guy, you can find that even a good buddy gets on your nerves, let alone a teammate you’ve already found to be slightly irritating. But when you’re climbing hard, those tensions dissolve and you get along better with your partners.

  From July 2 on, the 1938 team was pushing hard, with important deeds accomplished every day. And with this activity, morale soared. About one happy camp reunion, House writes, “A hot grog was served up and somewhere an excellent fig pudding was found. Later two chess games started and before we knew it Bates launched into a series of his favorite Alaskan sourdough ballads, startling even the Sherpas, who peered from their tents in awe.”

  Yet the climbing inevitably produced moments of high tension and even of anger. Since Five Miles High adheres scrupulously to the prohibition against airing dirty laundry, those conflicts are only hinted at, in passages whose tone turns semicomic. You have to read between the lines, for instance, to decipher the real antagonism between House and Petzoldt on one dicey traverse. In House’s telling,

  I remember in one place trying to enlarge some ice steps with my load on my back and a single finger linked through the head of a piton for balance. Petzoldt, who by now had completely recovered his strength and spirits, unfortunately chose this moment to deliver an enlightening and thoroughly sound discourse on step-cutting, with particular respect to how I might improve my technique. He admitted later that this was a poorly timed joke, for he had not realized I was hanging on by my eyelashes.