by Ed Viesturs
Whether or not Wiessner was overbearing and dictatorial toward his teammates, the logistical plan he came up with, although it necessitated a large number of load carries, strikes me as a brilliant one. Every camp was to be equipped with three sleeping bags and air mattresses, as well as stoves and gasoline and plenty of food. As Wiessner explained in 1984, “I believe that if you climb a mountain like this, you want to be sure, if something goes wrong or somebody gets ill, you can hold out for at least two weeks in any camp. If a man had to come down in very bad weather, he ought to be able to just fall into a tent, and everything would be there.”
The problem that developed on the 1939 expedition, starting at Camp IV, was due almost entirely, I think, to the physical weakness or psychological faintheartedness of all the “sahibs” except Wiessner and Wolfe. On June 21, Wiessner, Wolfe, Sheldon, and five Sherpa were established at Camp IV, with plenty of food and fuel. Wiessner was looking forward to leading House’s Chimney in the morning. Instead, a violent storm arrived in the night. With only a brief lull, the storm lasted through the next eight days.
At Camp II, 2,200 feet lower, Durrance guessed that the peak gusts of wind reached eighty miles an hour. At Camp IV, temperatures as low as minus 2 degrees Fahrenheit were recorded. Even Wiessner was daunted by the conditions. In a 1940 article in The American Alpine Journal, he would write, “To describe these days and nights of storm and cold is not within my power. They were terror-inspiring.”
It was at this point that George Sheldon seemed to have had his fill of K2. In Camp IV, he suffered frostnip of the toes. When the storm finally broke, on June 29, he descended with three Sherpa, eventually going all the way to base camp. Sheldon would make only one more load carry on the mountain. During the rest of the expedition, he and Wiessner would not see each other again.
Meanwhile, on June 30, after nine days at Camp IV, Wiessner started up House’s Chimney. The fixed ropes left by the 1938 party had frozen into the slope, and in any event, Wiessner was not willing to count on them. (Even in a single year’s worth of freezing and fraying in the wind, fixed ropes—especially the old hemp ones—become dangerously fragile. I’ve never completely trusted ropes left on 8,000ers by parties from previous years.)
So Wiessner led the pitch the same way his old partner Bill House had the year before, and it took him two hours (only half an hour less) to gain those critical 80 feet. In The American Alpine Journal article, he later saluted his friend’s 1938 effort: “I can only commend House for his ability in having originally led up this piece of difficult rock climbing.”
On top of the cliff, Wiessner strung a new fixed rope. Then, with the aid of strenuous hauling on the climbing rope, he got both Pasang Kikuli and Dudley Wolfe up the chimney. Wiessner was a slight man, wiry and only five feet six inches tall. Kikuli was also slight, but Wolfe was a big hulk of a fellow, and a clumsy climber to boot, so it must have taken a prodigious effort even for two men to drag him up the nearly vertical cliff. The trio pitched Camp V at 22,000 feet, reusing the platforms built up by the 1938 party. Then they waited out two more days of storm.
In this way, the team started to fragment. Down below, the Dartmouth students, Cranmer and Sheldon, of whom Wiessner had expected great things, had effectively thrown in the towel. Cromwell, whom Wiessner had appointed to the rather nominal role of deputy leader, had been intimidated from the start by the difficulty and the danger of the climbing on the Abruzzi. Now he declared that under no condition would he go above Camp IV. Only Durrance, among the American climbers below Camp V, still had any heart for the ascent. But he had been hampered all along by having to use old, lightweight boots, after a custom-made pair ordered from a Munich store had failed to arrive. When the new boots finally made their surprise appearance, carried up to base camp along with the mail by porters from Askole, Durrance was overjoyed. But thereafter, despite numerous attempts, he found it impossible to acclimatize. Even at only 20,000 feet, he would have to stop and pant desperately, crouched over with his hands on his knees. During the rest of the expedition, he would never climb higher than 600 feet above Camp VI, which was at 23,400 feet, below the Black Pyramid.
On our own K2 expedition in 1992, we had team members who seemed to lose heart for the project after they’d been on the mountain for a month. It’s all too easy to let one’s initial gung-ho enthusiasm evaporate in the face of storms and setbacks. In its place, a powerful longing to get the hell out of there and head for home takes over. That’s why I’ve always (and especially on K2) psyched myself up beforehand, to the point where I was willing to spend as long as it took on the mountain to get a chance to climb it. By June 30, the 1939 team had been at base camp or above for exactly one month. Already Sheldon, Cranmer, and Cromwell were, it seems, ready to go home, and it would not be long before Durrance was of the same mind.
So the two halves of the party began to separate—a disconnection that would have everything to do with the coming tragedy. Later, Wiessner would be severely criticized for allowing a communications gap to develop between the climbers up high and those waiting below. Some “experts” would fault him for not bringing along radios. But the 1938 team had had no radios, and it would be several years before these devices really became practical on mountains like K2.
Kauffman and Putnam admit that in 1939, intercamp radios were both exorbitantly heavy and unreliable. But they react to Wiessner’s later statement that he had chosen to do without radios “for ideological reasons” with yet another piece of armchair second-guessing: “Should ideology have been allowed to play a dominant role in a life-and-death situation, such as an assault on the world’s unclimbed, second-highest, and most formidable mountain?”
The inability or unwillingness of four of the Americans to climb high put a huge amount of pressure on the Sherpa. Not only did they take the brunt of the load hauling, but as the weeks passed, they moved between camps more and more while unaccompanied by any “sahibs.” In 1938, as much as Houston trusted Pasang Kikuli, he never let him climb solo between camps. The Sherpa were always paired with at least one of the four leading Americans. Pretty much the same routine had been the norm on all the British Everest expeditions since 1922.
In 1939, the Sherpa also became message carriers. Rather than climb up to a high camp to confer with Wiessner, Durrance, since he was unable to acclimatize, would write a note to the leader and entrust it to a Sherpa. This sometimes unreliable communication system created its own confusion.
To Wiessner, the responsibility of the climbers lower on the mountain was simple and obvious: get those camps supplied! The whole logistical pyramid depended on a chain of well-stocked camps leading all the way up the Abruzzi Ridge to the Shoulder. That makes perfect sense to me, and I know that if I’d been in Durrance or Cromwell’s shoes, I’d have done my damnedest to get those loads up the mountain. If that’s the agreed-upon plan, you stick to it. But Kauffman and Putnam, as well as other critics, fault Wiessner at this point for not giving clear orders to the troops in the rear.
What else could Wiessner have done? If he hadn’t been out front pushing the route, nobody would have done it. Sheldon and Cranmer were out of action; Cromwell refused to go above Camp IV; Durrance could not adjust to the altitude; and Wolfe, though game and strong, didn’t have the skill or nerve to lead.
As they researched K2: The 1939 Tragedy, Kauffman and Putnam won the trust of Jack Durrance, who was eighty years old by the time the book was published. And they made a great breakthrough when Durrance let them read and quote from his 1939 diary—a privilege he had granted to no previous journalist. Those diary entries add a wealth of new information about the expedition, and Kauffman and Putnam’s use of them goes a long way toward exonerating Durrance from his role as the villain of the 1939 K2 saga, a view some of Wiessner’s defenders (and Wiessner himself) long held.
Yet in many ways, Durrance’s diary only deepens the mystery of what went wrong on the mountain. Its passages, which vacillate between hopefulness and des
pair, between enthusiasm and misery, do not neatly support any of the latter-day theories about what caused the tragedy. One thing the diary does document, however, is just how disheartened and homesick the four rearguard Americans had become even before the end of June. On June 26, Durrance wrote, “The most discussed topic is what we shall do when once again in civilization—a week’s stay in Srinagar—sightseeing in India (Taj Mahal, etc.).” As Kauffman and Putnam acknowledge, at this relatively early stage of the assault, with the scheduled return of the porters from Askole still almost a month in the future, “Eyes turned away from the hardships of K2 and toward the comforts of home.”
There’s a term some mountaineers use for this phenomenon. It’s called “crumping.” To crump is to let the hardship and danger of expedition life drain you of all your mountaineering ambitions, so that all you want to do is get the hell out of there. (It’s not a piece of jargon I grew up hearing, but after a climbing friend defined it for me, I thought it was pretty appropriate.) By the end of June, the four Americans lower on the mountain had crumped. It happens a lot on expeditions. And after crump sets in, you’ve psychologically thrown in the towel: you care only about going home, and you’ll make up all kinds of excuses as to why it makes sense to hike out early.
Meanwhile, Wiessner, Wolfe, and the best Sherpa were pushing hard to establish higher camps. On July 5, carrying heavy loads, Wiessner, Pasang Kikuli, and Tse Tendrup placed Camp VI at 23,400 feet. The next day, Wiessner smoothly led up through the Black Pyramid to 24,500 feet, only a 900-foot traverse away from the slope where the 1938 team had pitched their highest camp.
As impressive as Wiessner’s leading virtually every foot of the route was another of his achievements. After June 21, when he had established Camp IV just below House’s Chimney, except for one very quick trip down to Camp II and back up, Wiessner would spend twenty-four straight days at or above 21,500 feet. Most climbers would simply fall apart under such a regimen—we all need to descend regularly on 8,000ers to recuperate at base camp or slightly higher. The longest continuous stretch I’ve ever spent above 21,500 feet was ten days on the north side of Everest. But Wiessner just seemed to get stronger as he moved higher on K2.
Dudley Wolfe’s performance surprised almost everyone. He was a clumsy enough climber that both Cromwell and Durrance expressed their doubts as to whether he belonged on the mountain at all. But when paired with Wiessner, Wolfe kept chugging upward. He had none of the problems acclimatizing that so afflicted Durrance, and up high, he seemed to have none of the fears that had made Cromwell vow never to go above Camp IV. Storms and cold fazed him very little. Wiessner would later characterize Wolfe as “the most loyal of my comrades.”
While Wiessner had been pushing the route up to 24,500 feet on July 5 and 6, Wolfe had rested in Camp V. Expecting his teammates to arrive from below with loads to equip the higher camps, he was first puzzled, then annoyed when no one showed up. On each of three consecutive days, Wolfe climbed down to the top of House’s Chimney and called out to Camp IV, only a few hundred feet below. No answer came. Where was the rest of the team?
On July 10, Wiessner took matters into his own hands. Leaving Wolfe and the Sherpa who had carried loads up high in Camp V, he dashed solo all the way down to Camp II—yet another herculean effort. Rallying his troops and the rest of the Sherpa, Wiessner got the supply train moving once more. Two days later, Durrance made his best effort to go high. With Wolfe, Wiessner, and two Sherpa, he struggled all the way up to Camp VI, but only 200 feet above the tents, he collapsed. With fixed ropes in place, it was a simple matter for him to slide back to Camp VI while the others forged ahead. As Durrance and Wiessner parted, the leader assumed his teammate would wait at Camp VI for more supplies, try to recuperate, and eventually push higher.
Despite Durrance’s continued problems with the altitude, Wiessner still considered him the most skilled of his teammates, and hoped the two would reach the summit together. Only gradually did he shift his plans and substitute Wolfe for Durrance in the summit party. But the third climber going for the top would be Pasang Kikuli, whose talent, experience, and courage Wiessner deeply admired. Had Wiessner climbed K2 with a Sherpa, it would have set a glorious example, one not realized until 1953 on Everest, when John Hunt, recognizing Tenzing Norgay’s vast experience and bold ambition, paired him with Hillary for the May 29 assault.
On July 14, Wiessner led four men—Wolfe, Tse Tendrup, Pasang Kitar, and Pasang Lama—all the way up to 25,300 feet, where they established Camp VIII. The going was very hard, as Wiessner broke trail through knee-deep snow covered with an icy crust, but as usual, he stayed in the lead the whole day. At last the team had solved the Abruzzi Ridge and reached the lower edge of the Shoulder. Wiessner planned to place one more camp at the upper end of the Shoulder, at or above 26,000 feet, and go from there for the top. After so many stormy spells, the good weather was holding splendidly.
Thus the stage was set for one of the most astounding performances in the history of mountaineering—and for the all-but-inexplicable disaster into which it would evolve.
Sadly, Pasang Kikuli was no longer at the front. On the push to Camp VII on July 12, he had suffered a recurrence of the frostbite that had first afflicted him on Nanga Parbat five years earlier. That evening, he stayed in Camp VI with the exhausted Durrance.
Having reached the lower edge of the Shoulder and set up Camp VIII on July 14, Wiessner sent Tse Tendrup and Pasang Kitar back down to Camp VII, where the team had already stockpiled “eleven loads of supplies.” Staying at Camp VIII were Wiessner, Wolfe, and Pasang Lama—after Kikuli, the strongest Sherpa on the mountain. There followed two days of light snow as the men rested. Then the weather turned fine again. On July 17, the three men set out carrying a tent, their sleeping bags and air mattresses, and food and fuel for seven days. Their goal was to establish a last camp at the upper end of the Shoulder, then launch the summit bid from there.
The going was agonizing, thanks to two days’ worth of new, soft snow that had piled up on the Shoulder. As he led, Wiessner sank into the powdery stuff up to his hips. Only 250 feet out of camp, the trio approached a bergschrund—a crevasse where the rocky core of the mountain is separated from the glacial mass that lies on top of it. Here the slope steepened, and though the crevasse itself was crossable on a snow bridge, the texture of the snow grew even softer and less stable. The snow bridge covered a gap of only twenty vertical feet, but it would take all the strength and skill Wiessner had to tame it. He would write in 1956:
After two hours of the hardest conceivable work I succeeded, almost by swimming, in getting up across the snow-bridge and then treading out a belaying stance on the steep slope above the bridge…. Pasang Lama followed in my trench but almost disappeared in the snow before he reached me; he too needed an hour. Now came Wolfe, by far the heaviest of us three. He was not able to master this place and suggested that he return to Camp VIII, only 100 steps away, and follow us with one or more of the supporting party the next day, when the tracks would have become firmer.
As Wolfe returned to Camp VIII, the other two men continued above, always with Wiessner breaking trail. Worn out from floundering in the deep snow, the pair pitched a temporary camp at 25,700 feet. The next day they pushed on. Wiessner had taken careful note of the “great ice cliff” that hangs over the Bottleneck couloir and the Shoulder, and he did not like the looks of it. On July 18, he and Pasang Lama crossed a field of scattered ice blocks—avalanche debris that had fallen from the cliff, the very same serac that would collapse in 2008. So Wiessner angled upward toward the left, leaving the Shoulder as he headed toward a band of rock cliffs, out of the line of fire of what I would later call the Motivator. By late that afternoon, the two men had pitched their tent on a solid snow platform, protected by the rock bands above. By Wiessner’s estimate, they were at 26,050 feet. The camp was even a little bit higher than our Camp IV in 1992. Wrote Wiessner later, “The view from this spot was inconceivably magnificent.”
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br /> By now, he was confident of success. On July 12, when Durrance had turned back to Camp VI, he and Wiessner had explicitly discussed their plans for the following days. There was no communications gap. As Wiessner later summarized the plan, “On July 14 Durrance was to attempt to climb to Camp VII with four Sherpas and if possible join us again higher up; in case he should not feel well he had only to send the Sherpas on up.” The agreement between Wiessner and Pasang Kikuli was equally clear. Since the best Sherpa could no longer hope to reach the summit, “his wish now was only to oversee the final support operations between Camps VI and VII.”
At Camp IX, 2,200 feet below the summit, Wiessner and Lama had six days of food and plenty of fuel. Beneath him on the mountain, Wiessner assumed, was a continuous string of well-stocked camps, the logistical pyramid he had designed from the start.
But things had not gone quite as planned. Still suffering miserably from the altitude at Camp VI, Durrance had decided to go down on July 14. And for some reason, he took Pasang Kikuli with him, as well as the other three Sherpa who were supposed to make critical carries to stock up the camps above. In the end, Durrance and Kikuli descended past Camp IV and all the way down to Camp II. The only concession to Wiessner’s plan came at Camp IV, where Durrance dropped off two of the Sherpa with instructions to ferry loads higher during the following days.
Durrance’s diary fails to explain why he took Kikuli down with him. Kauffman and Putnam interpret the action as springing from concern over Kikuli’s frostbite. But if so, why take the other Sherpa down as well? Even in his demoralized condition, Durrance must have realized that his precipitous descent with four Sherpa was sabotaging Wiessner’s plan.
Why did Kikuli accede to Durrance’s request? Wiessner drily wrote years later, “He was unhappy not to be given this job as planned.” “This job” was to stay at Camp VI and superintend the ferrying of loads higher on the mountain. Even though Kikuli was vastly more experienced than Durrance, the latter was still a “sahib”—and Sherpa took orders from sahibs even when they disagreed with them. But the best explanation for Kikuli’s heading down is that Durrance was by now in such bad shape that the Sherpa may have doubted whether he could make the trip by himself. Kauffman and Putnam partially agree: “Dawa [Thondup] and Kikuli, the latter with what appeared to be serious frostbite of his toes, because of which he could not stay high, had almost carried [Durrance] down the 2200 feet from Camp IV.”
