by Ed Viesturs
After interviewing those former teammates, Ringholz wrote:
Unfortunately, the $550 has been the source of ill feeling among the members of the K2 expedition for almost sixty years. Houston, House, and Bates claim it was difficult for them to scrape up that amount of money in those days when they were young and not established. They expected, and contend that Petzoldt promised them, that on his return to the States the loan would be repaid.
Houston’s biographer Bernadette McDonald comes to a similar conclusion:
Back in the United States, Charlie received an urgent cable from the Consul General requesting money. Together with his father, he quietly made the necessary arrangements for Petzoldt to return. Charlie never completely forgave Petzoldt for not thanking his family for helping him out in this moment of need. Petzoldt claimed ignorance on the source of the money, but the friendship subsequently withered.
Whether or not this event caused the estrangement between Petzoldt and Houston, there seems to have been another source of lasting rancor between the men. Houston always felt that his team had done the very best it could on K2. To have reached 26,000 feet on the first real attempt on the great mountain was more than anyone could have hoped for. But Petzoldt evidently thought the team could have done better.
A little-known fact about the 1938 expedition is that the members took along a movie camera, with which they shot footage not only on the approach to the Baltoro but all the way up to Camp III on the Abruzzi. In 2004, sixty-six years after the expedition, Houston had the best footage remastered and put on a DVD. A DVD disk was inserted in a plastic sleeve in each copy of McDonald’s Brotherhood of the Rope.
There’s some amazing footage from that expedition. For me, the most moving scene was shot as the climbers packed up their camps in a gathering storm to head down the mountain. The camera catches a tent flapping wildly in the wind, in front of which Bob Bates is grinning as he sings his head off—perhaps some Alaska sourdough ditty or one of the railroad ballads, such as “The Wreck of the Old 97,” that he had memorized and would sing at the drop of a hat for the rest of his life. There’s no sound track on the film, but in the voice-over that he supplied in 2004, Houston narrates:
We have done what we came to do. We have found a route to the summit cone, and we’re very happy and ready to go Home…. As the storm thickens, it’s clear that we must start for home as soon as the weather clears. In a few days it does clear, and we go on down to base camp, arriving there two days later, very excited, very happy. We have accomplished far more than most people expected we would. We have found a route up the mountain, and we enjoyed every minute of our success.
That formula summarizes Houston’s lasting feelings about the 1938 expedition. But Petzoldt’s lasting feelings were different—and less happy.
A friend of mine met Petzoldt in 1963, when he took a job as an assistant instructor at the Colorado Outward Bound School near Marble. Petzoldt, who was then fifty-five, was serving as one of the school’s senior guides. My friend, who was only twenty, was completely in awe of the great man. But one day he got up the nerve to ask Petzoldt about reaching their high point on K2 in 1938. Petzoldt said simply, “I wanted to go on. Charlie decided to turn back.”
Asked the same question by Raye Ringholz for her 1997 biography, Petzoldt responded more vehemently. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “We weren’t turned back by bad weather. We made up our mind not to climb the mountain. If we’d have brought up a little bit more food and planned to get to the summit, we could have gone back as conquerors of K2!”
Well, that’s how memory works. In hindsight, it’s pretty hard to congratulate yourself for making the right decision and turning back. I know that’s been a key to my own success on the 8,000ers—turning around and coming back to fight another day, even when it means giving up the glory. There’s no doubt in my mind that in 1938, Houston and Petzoldt made the right decision. They reached the highest point they could, while still allowing the whole team to get safely down.
But the anguish of that “what might have been” seems to have gnawed away at Petzoldt for the rest of his life. For whatever reasons, he never went back to the Himalaya or the Karakoram. The final word—and the saddest—on the gulf between Petzoldt and Houston came at the Telluride mountain film festival in the late 1990s. Both men were on a panel celebrating K2. The chairperson was Rick Ridgeway, who in 1978 had been one of the first four Americans to climb K2. In Brotherhood of the Rope, Bernadette McDonald replayed the scene:
[Petzoldt] said that he had been opposed to the decision to go down, and that the decision had been taken because Charlie wasn’t feeling well. Ridgeway looked over at Charlie and raised his eyebrows. Charlie said nothing. He was hurt and angry, but he didn’t respond.
As far as I know, Petzoldt never claimed that if Houston hadn’t decided to turn around, the two of them (or Petzoldt solo) could have reached the summit on July 21. Petzoldt’s declaration at the Telluride festival implies that he felt the team hadn’t built up enough supplies or pushed their deadlines hard enough to make a legitimate try for the summit. It’s just possible that he harbored a private fantasy that he could have gone for the top alone on July 21, as Hermann Buhl would do on Nanga Parbat in 1953. But it wouldn’t have been realistic.
Look at our own 1992 expedition. Vlad, who was a really strong climber, and who had the advantage of more than half a century of improvement in gear and knowledge of the mountain, left his camp on the Shoulder at 3:00 A.M. with a strong partner. He didn’t reach the summit until 9:00 P.M., after eighteen straight hours of climbing. Then he had to bivouac on the way down.
Houston and Petzoldt didn’t reach the upper end of the Shoulder until 1:00 P.M. on July 21. By that point they were already worn out from the climb from Camp VII. Even if Petzoldt had been strong enough to go all the way to the top, there’s no way he could have gotten there before nightfall. My God, in 1938 they didn’t even have headlamps—just flashlights they’d hold in one hand! And with the clothing they wore, I doubt that either Petzoldt or Houston could have survived a bivouac above 26,000 feet. And even if they had survived, they might have suffered debilitating frostbite.
In no sense should the 1938 expedition ever be regarded as a failure. It was, instead, a true breakthrough. When the summits of the fourteen 8,000ers were finally reached for the first time, between 1950 and 1964, only a single one—Annapurna—was climbed on the first attempt (and that at the cost of Herzog’s fingers and toes and Lachenal’s toes). K2 would finally be climbed only on the fourth attempt (or the sixth, if you count the 1902 and 1909 expeditions).
One of the things I admire about the 1938 expedition is that all the serious climbing was carried out by a team of only four, aided by three brave Sherpa, including the indomitable Pasang Kikuli. Whatever went on between them after the expedition, those four men became good friends on the mountain as they worked together with clockwork precision.
Their effort was a far cry from the kinds of huge militaristic expeditions countries would launch against the 8,000ers in the 1950s. I suppose that in a sense, Houston and his teammates carried an American banner to K2, but their expedition had nothing to do with nationalism. Ever since I first read Five Miles High, that 1938 team has served as a model for me of what a small group working in harmony can achieve on an 8,000er. By pioneering the route by which K2 would eventually be climbed, and by getting to 26,000 feet, they pulled off a magnificent achievement.
4
THE GREAT MYSTERY
The deepest mystery in K2 history is what happened on the 1939 expedition. All the other major campaigns on the mountain produced not only “official” books but articles and chapters in memoirs by the principal climbers. From the 1939 expedition, the only English-language publications to see the light of day were a dutiful and unilluminating article published in 1940 in The American Alpine Journal and a more illuminating (but still brief) account by the leader of the expedition that appeared seventeen years later in Appalachia
, the journal of the Appalachian Mountain Club.
Yet no K2 expedition—not even the vexed first ascent in 1954—ever provoked a storm of controversy comparable to the one that engulfed the 1939 climbers on their return home. As Galen Rowell writes in In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, his personal account of a star-crossed American attempt on K2’s northwest ridge in 1975, the 1939 expedition produced “the most bizarre tragedy in the history of Himalayan mountaineering.”
As is seldom true in climbing, the controversy was deeply enmeshed in the politics of the day. And the troubles that would afflict the 1939 team were set in motion even before the members left the United States, as Fritz Wiessner assumed leadership of the party.
In the winter of 1937–38 (as mentioned in the previous chapter), while he tried to assemble his K2 team, Charlie Houston suspected that Wiessner had deliberately put off his own expedition until the summer of 1939, in hopes that Houston’s party might pave his way with a thorough reconnaissance of the mountain. Whether or not Wiessner’s motives were so Machiavellian, that was exactly what happened, for in reaching 26,000 feet on the Abruzzi Ridge, Houston and his partners had demonstrated that K2 would best be climbed by that route.
Houston’s irritation was ratcheted up a notch when he began to suspect that Wiessner had already exacted pledges for the 1939 expedition from some of the best American climbers. In a letter to Bob Bates, Houston fumed,
Wiessner has asked him to go next year and Bill [House] thinks that would fit in better with his career. Bill makes number three that is not coming with us because Wiessner has extended hope of next year to him. I am so damn mad at Wiessner I have been aching to write him a fiery letter all day, but hope to restrain myself.
In the end, of course, House joined the 1938 team, which, ironically, meant that Wiessner’s friend and partner from the first ascent of Mount Waddington was not available for K2 in 1939.
The tragedy that would unfold that summer had everything to do with the makeup of the party. Besides Bill House, Wiessner hoped that Paul Petzoldt would be able to return to K2, but the fatal accident in India involving Petzoldt made that impossible. Through the winter of 1938–39, Wiessner doggedly lined up potential teammates. At one point, four very strong climbers were on board. Bestor Robinson had met Wiessner at the foot of Waddington, as part of a team of strong California rock climbers who had their own designs on the mountain. Wiessner had magnanimously given the Californians the first crack at Waddington. He and Bill House had made the first ascent only after Robinson’s crew turned back 600 feet below the summit. Back on the glacier after their defeat, Robinson hiked over to Wiessner’s camp and said, “It’s all yours. We’re just not ready for it.” In the process, the two men became friends.
Al Lindley, a Yale graduate from Minnesota, had made the second ascent of Mount McKinley in 1932; he was also an expert ski mountaineer. Sterling Hendricks had perfected the art of lightweight assaults on remote and little-known mountains, particularly in western Canada. Roger Whitney, yet another Yalie, had learned to climb in the Alps, and had made first ascents in Alaska, Canada, and the Tetons.
On paper, then, Wiessner’s party boasted plenty of skill and experience. At various times through the spring of 1939, however, all four of those strong teammates backed out of the expedition. Some of Wiessner’s critics later tried to see those defections as rooted in a distrust of Wiessner’s leadership, but I don’t buy it. In those days, nobody could make a living from mountain climbing. All those guys had jobs they couldn’t sacrifice: Whitney was a physician, Hendricks a biochemist, and Lindley and Robinson were lawyers. Then, as now, an expedition to K2 was an expensive undertaking. Climbers often back out of such trips after they’ve made a tentative commitment to them. Look at our own K2 team in 1992: Scott went from having so many teammates lined up—that he had to put me on the waiting list—to heading off to Pakistan with only me as a partner.
In the end, Wiessner had to scrounge among casual friends he had met climbing or skiing. And he was swayed to include relatively inexperienced candidates whose deep pockets could help pay the cost of the expedition. The pivotal figure in this roster was Dudley Wolfe, a near millionaire from Boston. After graduating from Harvard, Wolfe had become an expert in long-distance sailing races, as well as a competent skier. But he had taken up climbing only in 1936. By 1939, he was overweight and forty-four years old. According to Andrew Kauffman and William Putnam, the authors of K2: The 1939 Tragedy—published in 1992, it remains the only book-length chronicle of the expedition—Wolfe “required more than one guide [in the Alps] to haul his large bulk to the summits…. He was not accustomed to making decisions in the mountains and could move over difficult terrain only with the guidance and help of others.” Wolfe’s funding may have been the chief reason why Wiessner invited him to K2, but on the mountain, against all odds, he would perform better than all the other Americans (except, of course, Wiessner himself).
Forty-two-year-old Eaton (“Tony”) Cromwell was also a blueblood with access to money. Like Wolfe, he had climbed mostly with guides. As Kauffman and Putnam sardonically put it, Cromwell’s “main climbing qualifications for candidacy on the 1939 expedition consisted of the longest, but not most distinguished, list of mountain ascents of any member of the American Alpine Club; and there is some reason to believe that no one ever attempted to surpass this record, much less to boast of it.” Cromwell, in other words, was what we climbers dismissively call a “peak bagger.”
In the 1930s, forty-four and forty-two were pretty advanced ages for climbers attempting K2. But Wiessner, at thirty-nine, was at the top of his alpine game, and that summer he was, by his own report, in the best shape of his life. He had reached 23,000 feet on Nanga Parbat in 1932, and his record of technical first ascents in Europe and the United States was unmatched by any other American.
The party was rounded out by two Dartmouth students. Chappell Cranmer had shared part of a single season with Wiessner in the Canadian Rockies, but the bulk of his experience consisted of weekends on New England crags and slogs up easy peaks in Colorado. His classmate George Sheldon was even less experienced, with only two seasons in the Tetons under his belt, during which he seconded routes led by more accomplished climbers. Both Dartmouth boys were only twenty years old.
As the team sailed for Europe in March, it must have been obvious to Wiessner that he was the leader of perhaps the weakest team to that date ever to attempt an 8,000er—much less the formidable K2. Executives of the American Alpine Club, which officially sponsored the expedition, were so apprehensive that at the last minute they recruited a sixth man, Jack Durrance. A twenty-six-year-old Dartmouth medical student, Durrance had become a first-rate rock climber in the Bavarian Alps after his family had moved to Munich. Back in the States, he worked three summers as a guide in the Tetons, where he compiled a record of first ascents in that spiky range that was second only to Petzoldt’s. His finest climb was the first ascent of the north face of Grand Teton—with Petzoldt and Petzoldt’s brother, Eldon. On that daunting route, Durrance led the hardest pitches.
Durrance should have been a powerful addition to the party, but for strange reasons, it would not work out that way. He caught up with his teammates in Genoa, where they all boarded a steamship for India. And from that moment on, things started to go wrong.
Wiessner had not been notified of the addition of Durrance to the party. In Genoa, he was expecting to meet Bestor Robinson, who had backed out only after the other five climbers had sailed for Europe. Greeting Durrance, Wiessner could not suppress his shock and dismay, and Durrance was badly hurt by his leader’s reaction. In his diary, Durrance wrote a few weeks later, “Can’t quite forget Fritz’s look of disappointment at finding insignificant Jack filling Bestor Robinson’s boots.”
On all thirty of my expeditions to 8,000ers, I don’t think I ever joined a party as weak as that 1939 team. There were plenty of feeble performers among the Americans in 1992 on K2, as I kept complaining to my diar
y, but we also had enough strong guys—particularly Scott, Charley Mace, and Neal Beidleman—to put together a decent summit effort. In 1939, Wiessner was the only member of the team who had ever previously been on a mountain in the great ranges, whether in Alaska, the Andes, the Himalaya, or the Karakoram. It’s hard for me to say, particularly given the half-century gap between Wiessner’s era and mine, but I think that if I had found myself part of a party with as little collective experience as that one, I’d have backed out. And if I’d been the leader, I might have called off the whole endeavor.
Inexperienced teammates can get you in trouble on a serious mountain. John Roskelley, the best American high-altitude climber of the 1980s and my teammate on Kangchenjunga in 1989, had an ironclad principle that he would never jumar up a fixed rope that had been anchored by someone else. He didn’t trust any teammate to fix those anchors the way he trusted himself. (I’m not so adamant about this myself, but I respect Roskelley’s stubborn self-reliance.)
Inexperience among the teammates on the 1939 expedition would contribute directly to the tragedy. But there’s no evidence that Wiessner ever thought of calling off the show. For one thing, he had an ace up his sleeve: he had recruited nine Sherpa in advance. Five of them were returning from Houston’s expedition of the previous year: Pasang Kikuli, Phinsoo, and Tse Tendrup, who had all carried loads high on the Abruzzi; Pemba Kitar, who had performed the extraordinary errand of dashing down to Askole to recruit porters to carry firewood up to base camp; and Sonam. Rounding out the Sherpa contingent were Pasang Lama, who would play a pivotal role on the ‘39 expedition, Tsering, Dawa Thondup, and Pasang Kitar.
If the American team was weak, the nine Sherpa amounted to as strong a cast as had ever signed on for an expedition to an 8,000er. It is no exaggeration to say that in 1939, Pasang Kikuli was the most experienced high-altitude climber in the world, with six previous expeditions to 8,000ers (seven if you count Nanda Devi, which is just under 8,000 meters). Kikuli had seen tragedy before, on Nanga Parbat in 1934, when eight climbers died after getting trapped in a storm high on the mountain. (That and the equally catastrophic 1937 Nanga Parbat expedition were, in the words of historian James Ramsey Ullman, “as sheer horror stories, unmatched by anything in the history of mountaineering.”) The dead in 1934 included the team’s leader, Willi Merkl (the finest German Himalayan mountaineer of his time), two German teammates, and five Sherpa. Kikuli narrowly escaped the same fate but suffered serious frostbite. It’s a testament to what a powerful and devoted climber Kikuli was that he continued to go on so many dangerous expeditions. In 1939, he was the sirdar again, as he had been in 1938, and he became Wiessner’s “personal” Sherpa, just as he had been Houston’s the year before.
