K2

by Ed Viesturs

  On July 12, an incident occurred that, thanks in large part to misunderstandings, could easily have killed one or more of the climbers. Camp III had been pitched in a very dangerous place, directly beneath a steep slope that was littered with loose rocks. That day, Bates, House, and Phinsoo had no sooner arrived at Camp III than Houston, Petzoldt, Pasang Kikuli, and Tse Tendrup started to carry loads above. As they departed, they promised that “they would be as careful as possible with the loose rock.”

  The trio who had just arrived at Camp III set to work improving the tent platforms. Suddenly, from 500 feet above, the first rock fell.

  It came right among us, puncturing the tent we had just erected. From then on, at frequent intervals, rocks dropped. Sometimes they fell far to one side; sometimes they flew overhead with a high-pitched hum; sometimes they crashed right into camp, bursting like shrapnel as they hit the slope. There was no escape.

  The three men in the line of fire were terrified—and furious. They screamed at their comrades above. But, as House explains, “A high wind was blowing so the climbers could not hear our shouts and thought the rocks were bouncing harmlessly out to the sides.” By the time the four men in the lead had almost returned to camp, their three teammates were “wild,” unable to suppress “bitter remarks.” As they arrived, Houston, Petzoldt, and the two Sherpa found “their cheery greeting followed by a dead silence. One look at the holes in all three of the tents was enough to tell them what had happened.”

  I can completely sympathize with those guys’ predicament. No one was really to blame—the true cause of the potentially fatal accident was the bad placement of Camp III. But given the logistics of the day, that placement was unavoidable. What else could Houston and Petzoldt have done? They weren’t happy with the location of Camp III, but they had to climb. From 500 feet above, you can’t tell where the rocks you knock loose are landing. And on that kind of sketchy terrain, it’s almost impossible to avoid dislodging rocks.

  But in Five Miles High, House gives the dispute a happy ending:

  While we sat and sulked, seeking the most effective way of voicing our great displeasure, [Houston and Petzoldt] rummaged through the food supplies. A short time later they brought humble offerings of jam, dates, and hot tea hastily conjured out of sun-melted snow. With such companions ill-humor could not last long, and soon we were laughing sheepishly at what we had let ourselves in for.

  So the official expedition narrative sticks to its formula of tucking the dirty laundry out of sight. But in her 2007 biography of Houston, Bernadette McDonald published excerpts from Houston’s letters home that, when I first read them, puzzled me. “Petzoldt has turned out to be a gem,” Houston wrote early on in the expedition. The tension between the cowboy and the nabob seemed to have vanished. It was instead Bill House of whom Houston was critical. “He is continually complaining about the lack of food,” Houston wrote around June 27, “and demands much more than we are able to provide. He is a very fine climber, but his choice of routes is poor and he takes far too many chances. In addition, he has frequent depressed spells during which is very bad company.”

  These strictures are all the more surprising in view of the fact that House led many of the hardest pitches all the way up the Abruzzi Ridge to just below the Shoulder, including the indisputable crux of that 8,000-foot ascent. As I mentioned earlier, the nearly vertical 80-foot rock fissure at 21,500 feet has been known ever since as House’s Chimney. On July 14, with Bates belaying, House tackled the cliff.

  The team had pitched Camp IV only 75 feet below that cliff, but the ice leading up to it was so hard that it took the two men a full hour to chop steps to reach the base of the chimney. Bates set up a belay by draping a loop of rope over a prong of rock, then passing the rope behind the prong. That technique harkened back to Victorian times, but by today’s standards it seems pretty marginal. If House had fallen off the cliff, the hemp rope might well have severed as it came tight on the sharp rock.

  House’s lead was a desperate struggle, as it took him two and a half hours to surmount the 80-foot pitch. He managed to drive a good piton near the base of the crack, but 40 feet higher, as he stood on a tiny ledge and tried to place a second piton, “the metal only crumpled up after penetrating a half-inch of rock.” (The soft-iron pitons of the day, the best available, were all too liable to bend into useless spikes under a hammer blow. It would not be until the 1960s that chrome-molybdenum pitons vastly improved on the old hardware.)

  To inch his way up the fissure, House got into classic chimney position, feet flat against one wall, back against the other. Abruptly, however, he realized that he had left his crampons in his pack. The metal spikes dug into his back and caught on nubbins of rock. Only by thrashing his way brutally upward could House gain ground. “I felt I was pretty close to my margin of safety,” he later wrote, “but there were no piton cracks and I thought anything would be better than climbing down without some protection from above.”

  Out of sight around a corner below, shivering with cold, Bates shouted up to urge that House retreat. “It was a suggestion I certainly would have liked to follow,” House joked in retrospect. Instead, he struggled onward, at last emerging on top of the cliff.

  The importance of House’s brilliant lead can hardly be overestimated. In that long band of cliff at 21,500 feet, there’s no other weakness, so no alternative to the chimney. If the climbers had not been able to get up that pitch, their attempt on the Abruzzi Ridge would have ended then and there.

  In 1992, after Scott and I drew straws and I won the lead, I got up the fissure not by chimneying inside it but by stemming outside, my feet and hands spread-eagled on rock holds on either side. Unlike House, I wore my crampons all the way up. I was able to clip in to a couple of pitons already in place—”fixed pins” left by some previous expedition. It’s almost impossible to rate pure climbing moves on a big mountain, but I’d say the chimney was only about 5.4. (The decimal scale of difficulty in use today ranges from 5.1, the easiest, to 5.15, the hardest. In the 1960s, when pitches harder than 5.9 started to be performed, climbers could think of no way to rate them except by calling them 5.10, then 5.11, and so on.)

  On the other hand, I found the crack half-choked with ice and snow, into which I could kick a few footholds, which I’m sure made the pitch easier than it was for House. No matter what, as Peter Boardman remarked in 1980, House’s Chimney was far harder than anything that had been climbed on Everest by 1938.

  The climbing had so worn out Bates and House that they decided to pitch Camp V only a little bit higher, a mere 500 vertical feet above Camp IV. They had reached the foot of the Black Pyramid, a steep, triangular buttress made up of mixed rock.

  By now Burdsall, though he had gamely carried loads to the lower camps, had dropped out of the team pushing higher on the route. At forty-two, he was the oldest of the five American climbers and the least skilled technically. Streatfeild had already withdrawn from the advance guard, as he’d performed his fuel-searching mission to Gasherbrum I, then turned his attention to surveying unmapped parts of the surrounding peaks and glaciers.

  The climbers still pushing high were reduced to Bates, House, Houston, and Petzoldt—as well as the three strongest Sherpa. Among those three, Pasang Kikuli was the stalwart, performing as well as the four Americans.

  In 1992, after I’d strung a good fixed rope down House’s Chimney, it was a routine business to rappel down that pitch and jumar back up it. Not so for the guys in 1938, who, carrying twenty-five-pound loads up the chimney, had to haul themselves hand over hand as they hung on the loops they had tied in the fixed rope.

  From July 15 to 20, as the weather held almost perfect, the climbers frenziedly pushed the route higher and higher. Houston and Petzoldt made some daring, exposed leads as they forced their way through the Black Pyramid. The team established a Camp VI at 23,300 feet, and then Camp VII at 24,700 feet. On the afternoon of July 19, Petzoldt and Houston broke through the 25,000-foot barrier. Only a
relatively low-angle snow slope stood between them and the Shoulder.

  There’s a line of Houston’s about this gutsy push that makes me chuckle: “After a restful cigarette, which seemed especially welcome at these high altitudes, we turned again to our task.” These guys, in the shape of their lives, were smoking all the way up the mountain!

  That evening, with everyone ensconced in Camp VI, the team held another council of war. Bates had calculated that the men had only ten days’ worth of food and fuel left. Worried about an eventual descent in bad weather, the party decided to err on the side of caution and send only two climbers up to push the route to the highest possible altitude. Without even putting the question to a vote, the team chose Houston and Petzoldt, as Bates and House magnanimously stepped aside.

  On July 20, all four men made the last carry to Camp VII. They decided that the Sherpa had “reached the limits of their climbing ability” and so should be left behind; but at the last minute Pasang Kikuli begged to be included, and the “sahibs” relented.

  That evening, Petzoldt and Houston settled into their sleeping bags at Camp VII, restless and eager for the final push the next morning. Houston had already concluded that there was no hope of reaching the top; it would be achievement enough simply to scope out a route through the summit pyramid that might show the way for some future party to make the first ascent of K2. In light of subsequent events, Petzoldt apparently did not agree.

  And then the pair made a dismal discovery: they had forgotten to bring matches with their loads! Without matches, there would be no way to light the stove; without the stove, no way to melt snow into water. Houston later wrote,

  This was a catastrophe. In my pocket I found four safety matches and five strike-anywhere matches, all of dubious value. The latter, brought all the way from New York, carefully dried in the sun at many of the lower camps, had persistently failed to function well above 20,000 feet, and only with extreme care and preparatory rubbings with grease did they even glow. The safety matches, on the other hand, were made in Kashmir and were very fragile.

  It took three matches to light the stove for dinner. The men melted pot after pot of snow, and even slept with a pot full of water wrapped in their clothing and placed under their feet, so that it would not freeze during the night.

  In the morning, it took three more matches to light the stove to cook breakfast. The two men were off as soon as the sun’s rays struck their tent. Roped together 60 feet apart, Petzoldt and Houston slowly plodded up the snow slopes leading to the Shoulder, often plunging in to their knees. In an era before down jackets, each man wore four Shetland sweaters over his flannel shirt, with an outer windproof suit and two pairs of wool mittens, but they still felt the cold acutely.

  On that last push, the Wyoming cowboy came into his own. “Petzoldt was feeling strong and moving rapidly,” Houston later admitted, “but I had a curious weakness in my legs, so that every upward step was an effort requiring several breaths.” By 1:00 P.M., the two men had not only topped out on the Shoulder but had traversed its easy ridge to a point only 900 feet short of the slope that leads up to the Bottleneck couloir.

  The men ate a quick lunch, then unroped, hoping to dry the coiled line by laying it out in the sun. Petzoldt continued in the lead. Houston later recalled,

  I could see him ahead of me working steadily upward, pausing now and then to take bearings. My progress was ludicrously slow. Every inch I gained in altitude was an effort. My legs were so weak I was forced to rest every five or six steps, and soon fatigue made me forget all danger from above. I struggled on—why I do not know.

  At last Houston gave up and sat down with his back against a large boulder, trying to warm himself in the sun. Petzoldt plugged onward. He reached a point several hundred feet higher than his partner before turning around himself. At 26,000 feet, Petzoldt was still 2,250 feet below the summit.

  All his life, Houston inclined toward the mystical. Of that high point on K2 he later wrote,

  I tried to look ahead years into the future so as to cement firmly in my mind recollections of these great moments on our mighty peak. There were other emotions too deep to be expressed. I felt that all my previous life had reached a climax in these last hours of intense struggle against nature…. I believe in those minutes at 26,000 feet on K2, I reached depths of feeling which I can never reach again.

  The two men started down at 4:00 P.M., reaching their tent as dusk turned to twilight. They had a desperate craving for hot tea, but there were only three matches left. Houston recalled:

  With infinite care we waxed one of the matches, dried it as much as possible, and struck it. It fizzled and went out. A safety match broke off at the head. Paul in a gesture of bravado struck our last one. It lit and we were assured of our warm supper. Too tired for much talk, we melted water for the morning, snuggled in our sleeping bags, and drowsed off to a dreamless sleep.

  The climb was over, but not the expedition. It took three more days for the team to climb carefully back to base camp, retrieving gear (but not the fixed ropes) as they went; six more days to hike with their porters back to Askole; and eleven more days, some of them on horseback, to return to Srinagar by a shorter route than the one they had taken on the way out. All told, from Srinagar to Srinagar the expedition lasted ninety days.

  Exhausted though the men must have been after their effort on K2, they regarded the retreat from the Karakoram as simply the final stage in a three-month lark. For all six of the “sahibs,” the expedition had been one of the greatest adventures of their lives. In the last pages of Five Miles High, Burdsall sums up the team’s sense of satisfaction:

  Behind us were unforgettable days—days on the march, and days on the peak, whose memories we would not exchange for anything. No harm had come to us or to any of our helpers. In a few days we must say farewell to our Kashmiri and our faithful little Sherpas…. Later we sahibs too must part to go our separate ways, but we knew that our bond of friendship would last as long as life itself.

  Alas, the aftermath of the 1938 expedition to K2 would turn out not to be quite so clean and pure. It’s always seemed to me that one of the saddest things that can happen in mountaineering is for teammates to get along well during an expedition, only to have a falling out afterward. One of the best-known examples is the partnership of the Austrian Peter Habeler with the Tyrolean Reinhold Messner. During the 1970s, they set the climbing world on fire, with such astounding deeds as the ascent of the Eiger Nordwand in a then-record time of ten hours. In 1978, Habeler and Messner pulled off their greatest feat when they climbed Everest without bottled oxygen, despite widespread predictions that climbers would die or suffer irreversible brain damage in such an attempt.

  Messner and Habeler apparently got along fine on Everest. The trouble came afterward, in the discrepancies between the books the two men wrote about their adventure. (Messner, who always had an outsized ego, seems to have resented the fact that Habeler would write a book at all.) The media seized upon the conflict, and the two former best friends began a feud that lasted a quarter century. To their credit, these two great mountaineers finally patched up their quarrel and even climbed together again.

  After K2, Paul Petzoldt stayed on in India for several months. His initial intention was simply to sightsee, but he soon fell under the spell of a very odd duck named Dr. Johnson. The man was a retired physician from California who had come to India as a Baptist missionary, repudiated his faith, and set himself up as a guru of a mystical Buddhist cult. Petzoldt was so taken with Johnson (whose first name he could not later recall), that he arranged to have his wife, Patricia, join him at Johnson’s compound in the village of Dera Baba Jaimal Singh.

  On January 25, 1939, gathering tensions within the Johnson household exploded. The only published versions of this bizarre event appear in the two biographies of Petzoldt, and they disagree in many details. Since the first biography, On Top of the World, was written by Patricia herself, who was present at the time, it may be su
spect, because her agenda would have been to exonerate her husband of any wrongdoing. But even the more reliable account, in Raye Ringholz’s 1997 On Belay!, depends entirely on Petzoldt’s own story of what happened.

  In this telling, Johnson’s wife, who is portrayed as a depressive paranoiac, suddenly seized a shotgun and tried to shoot Petzoldt with it. Petzoldt grabbed the stock of the gun, struggled with her for several moments, wrenched the weapon out of her hands, and threw it out a window. In the melee, Dr. Johnson had hurried into the room. As Petzoldt fled into the courtyard, he accidentally knocked Johnson down. The guru’s head struck the stone floor and he was instantly killed.

  (In the 1960s, in climbing circles, the scuttlebutt told an utterly different story. In this version, Petzoldt had ended up in a fistfight with a porter on some sort of trek and had killed him with a single blow to the head. Like most Wyoming cowboys, Petzoldt had honed his skills as a brawler and bar fighter. The climbing gossip had it that Petzoldt was allowed to leave India only after promising that he would never return to the country.)

  In Ringholz’s account, Petzoldt and the other witnesses to the accident fabricated a bogus version of what had happened. Even so, Petzoldt was charged with manslaughter and underwent a three-day trial before he was acquitted. By then, he was flat broke. The American consul took him under his wing and communicated with Charlie Houston, who was back in the United States. Houston shared the news with Bates and House. The four men scrounged up $550, which they wired to Calcutta. The money paid for both Petzoldts’ passage home by steamer.

  Yet according to Ringholz, Petzoldt never realized that his teammates had come to his financial rescue. “I never knew that they sent the money there,” he told his biographer. “If they sent money to the consul, I never got it.”