K2

by Ed Viesturs

  As few mountaineers ever do, Wiessner kept climbing at a very high level into his seventies and even early eighties, though he turned his talents away from the big ranges and toward rock climbing on smaller crags. Never again did he go on an expedition to the Karakoram or the Himalaya.

  Beginning in the 1960s, and accelerating through the ‘70s and ‘80s, American climbing underwent a cultural revolution. A new generation, reexamining the 1939 expedition, saw armchair critics such as Kenneth Mason as reactionary old fogeys, while Wiessner was in effect reborn as one of the greatest climbers in history, his deeds on K2 considered heroic rather than foolish or neglectful.

  In In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, Galen Rowell pithily summed up this reevaluation:

  Leaders don’t belong in the first summit team? What about Maurice Herzog on Annapurna? Sherpas must not move unsupervised over difficult terrain? What about the repeated instances on many of the hallowed British attempts on Everest? Mountain summits aren’t worth risking lives for? Only a rare windless night on May 22, 1963, kept four Americans from perishing in an open bivouac near the top of Mount Everest…. Taking a climber of Wolfe’s meager experience on a big mountain was unprecedented? Andrew Irvine, Mallory’s famous companion on Mount Everest in 1924, was even less experienced, but like Wolfe he outperformed those with better records.

  In 1966, Andy Kauffman, Bill Putnam, and several other AAC members persuaded Wiessner to rejoin the club. (It would be decades before Kauffman and Putnam would turn critical of the man they had so long admired and championed.) Soon afterward, in partial expiation of the wrong it had done him years before, the club made him an honorary member for life.

  In December 1978, the annual AAC banquet meeting was held in Estes Park, Colorado. The previous summer, my friend Jim Wickwire and his three teammates had become the first Americans to reach the summit of K2. The whole focus of the meeting was to be on K2, and Jack Durrance, who was then living in Denver, was invited to give a slide show about the 1939 expedition. Hearing about this, Wiessner flew back from a meeting in Europe in order to be present.

  I wasn’t there, but a friend of mine who was later recounted for me the dramatic events that took place. All day long, the rumors flew that a long-delayed confrontation was about to occur. Durrance was finally going to tell “his side” of the story. Meanwhile, Dee Molenaar, who had been on the 1953 K2 expedition, managed to talk Wiessner and Durrance into saying hello to each other. It was the first time they had seen each other since parting in India in 1939. The meeting was curt in the extreme.

  A number of AAC old-timers took Durrance aside. They talked him out of making any inflammatory remarks. Whatever dirty laundry remained from 1939, they said, this was not the place to air it. Durrance gave in. His slide show carried the expedition up to base camp, then closed abruptly with a photo of himself in “retirement” in a cabin near the Tetons.

  Later, at the banquet, Wiessner was given a special toast in recognition of his years of service to mountaineering. The crowd’s reaction was deeply emotional, and the whole assemblage rose to its feet, applauding wildly—except for Durrance, who remained seated, his face fixed in a scowl.

  Fritz Wiessner died in 1988, at the age of eighty-eight. During the last decade of his life, Kauffman and Putnam interviewed him at length, as they planned to write his biography. Their book did not come out until 1992. For reasons best known to themselves, the work they published was not a biography at all but an account of the 1939 expedition that its authors hoped would be the definitive record.

  Kauffman and Putnam did meticulous research, and they discovered evidence that no one else had been privy to, such as Durrance’s diary and Groth’s memorandum to the State Department. But K2: The 1939 Tragedy was deeply disappointing to younger climbers who had come to see Wiessner as a hero. For some, Kauffman and Putnam’s book verged on a betrayal.

  I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it is galling to see the same old ethnic stereotypes from the 1930s and ‘40s recycled in the authors’ strictures and interpretations. And it’s annoying how Kauffman and Putnam sit in condescending judgment of Wiessner. The authors were good climbers themselves—Kauffman was one of the two men who made the first ascent of Gasherbrum I in 1958, the only 8,000er pioneered by Americans. But their smug second-guessing of an even better climber, Fritz Wiessner, is hard to swallow. A couple of examples:

  Fritz had a different attitude toward mountaineering from the others. The Americans played for fun, Fritz for keeps. Fritz also adhered to an authoritarian leadership model, whereas the Americans had a tradition of independence, even of rebellion.

  On K2 and elsewhere Fritz Wiessner demonstrated outstanding skill as a climber. But what can be said of his leadership on the 1939 K2 expedition? … Did he treat his companions even-handedly? Did he make allowance for the weaknesses of those less competent than himself and recognize the perils to which these weaknesses might expose the undertaking? Finally, did he overextend his human resources and, at the critical moment, rely on luck?

  The upshot of K2: The 1939 Tragedy is to blame Wiessner for much of what went wrong on the expedition, and even to implicate him in errors of judgment that led to the deaths of Dudley Wolfe and the three Sherpa. As if in counterbalance, Durrance comes across almost as the hero of the story, constantly solicitous of the well-being of his teammates and doing his best to hold the fragile team together.

  It’s hard to understand how these two men, who, in the 1960s, had the most to do with rehabilitating Wiessner, who championed his readmission to the AAC and his honorary membership, could write a supposedly “authoritative” account of the 1939 expedition that on almost every other page makes some sly criticism of the leader.

  A friend of mine who knew Wiessner well and Putnam fairly well has his theory. He told me recently, “For years Kauffman and Putnam spent day after day with Fritz, recording his memories and listening to him tell his old war stories. Fritz could be pretty imperious, and he probably took for granted that these two guys would hang on his every word. And when you got Fritz talking about K2, his bitterness came to the surface.

  “I can imagine that after years of this, Kauffman and Putnam got a little tired of Fritz. They may have started resisting some of the things he told them. And then they befriended Jack Durrance, and got on his good side, until Durrance let them read and quote from his diary. That July 18 entry was a bombshell—it pretty much disproved Fritz’s lifelong idea that Durrance was the villain of the expedition.

  “So by the time Kauffman and Putnam were ready to write, they had lost interest in doing a biography. But they thought they had instead the true story of what happened on one of the most enigmatic expeditions of all time. And by now, conveniently enough, Fritz was dead. He couldn’t answer them from the grave.”

  My friend used to be an English professor. He explained, “This kind of thing happens a lot in biography. The classic example is Lawrance Thompson’s bio of Robert Frost. Frost chose Thompson to be his official biographer, and he lived so long that the research covered decades. Frost was every bit as imperious as Wiessner. There are stories about how he would call up Thompson from his retirement home in Florida and say something like, ‘Come on down—I’m ready to tell you about 1913.’ By the time Thompson wrote the biography, he hated Frost. In that three-volume life, Frost comes across as a great poet but a monster in human terms. One reviewer called it ‘a big fat voodoo doll of a biography, with Thompson puncturing Frost from every angle.’ But that’s still the public image of Frost, which no amount of later scholarship has been able to undo.”

  No matter what the ultimate causes of the tragedy were, any climber has to be in complete awe of Wiessner’s performance on K2. To lead virtually every pitch of the whole climb, to break trail through the deepest and softest snow every single day, to have established a well-stocked series of camps all the way up the mountain with only minimal support from his American teammates, to have used his ax belay and self-arrest to save the
lives of his teammates twice, to have done the hardest climbing so far accomplished anywhere at such an altitude in order to reach a point only 750 vertical feet below the summit, to be ready to go through the night to get to the top—there’s really nothing like it in the annals of mountaineering in the great ranges.

  And you have to be in awe of the hard work, the loyalty, and the heroism of the Sherpa—particularly Pasang Kikuli, Pasang Kitar, and Phinsoo, who gave their lives trying to save Dudley Wolfe.

  I’ve heard guys say that if Wiessner had reached the summit of K2 in 1939, with or without Pasang Lama, it would have been the greatest accomplishment in mountaineering history. I agree—but in my opinion, that feat would have been nearly impossible. In the years since 1939, such a tour de force has been performed on rare occasions, but more often climbers pushing their limits to such extremes don’t survive the ordeal.

  I get asked all the time whether I think Mallory and Irvine reached the summit of Everest in 1924. I always answer, “It doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant, because they didn’t make it back down.” That may sound a little harsh, but it’s the logical application of the motto by which I lived during my pursuit of the fourteen 8,000ers: Reaching the summit is optional. Getting down is mandatory.

  What really impresses me about Fritz Wiessner is that, believing that the achievement of a lifetime was well within his grasp, tempted to un-rope and go for the summit alone, he listened to the terrified plea of his partner and instead turned back. After K2, Pasang Lama would go on to become one of the greatest Sherpa of his generation. He went on many more Himalayan expeditions, and in 1954 he reached the summit with an Austrian party on the first ascent of Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth-highest mountain.

  According to Galen Rowell,

  In the middle sixties, an American climber visiting Nepal met Pasang and asked him about the 1939 expedition. His eyes lit up as he talked about his friend “Fritz sahib,” who had saved his life by not forcing him to continue to the summit…. “Give Fritz sahib my good wishes,” said Pasang as the American left.

  There is no getting around the fact that Wiessner agonized for the rest of his life about the decision he made at 27,500 feet on July 19, 1939. As he put it in 1984, at age eighty-four:

  If I were in wonderful condition like I was then, if the place where my man stood was safe, if the weather was good, if I had a night coming on like that one, with the moon and the calm air, if I could see what was ahead as I did then … then I would probably unrope and go on alone. But I can get pretty weak, if I feel that my man will suffer. He was so afraid, and I liked the fellow. He was a comrade to me, and he had done so well.

  5

  BROTHERHOOD

  They say that every adventurer suffers from the conviction that he was born too late. When, as a teenager, I read the classic books of polar exploration—like Robert Falcon Scott’s diary of his fatal trip to the south pole or the various books about Ernest Shackleton’s heroic expedition when his ship, the Endurance, was trapped in the ice off Antarctica and sank—I was taken aback by a recurrent theme: those guys were sure they’d been born too late. By 1900, there was no western frontier left to explore, uninhabited by anybody except Indians; no island in the South Pacific waiting to be discovered by a Captain Cook; no source of the Nile still lost in the blank spaces on the map of Africa. Scott and Shackle-ton and their rivals wondered at times whether trying to reach the poles was too arbitrary a goal. After all, the south pole was simply a spot on an empty, windswept glacial plateau, defined not by a wilderness that could be tamed and settled but by a unique latitude: ninety degrees south. Nobody who ever read Scott’s diary can forget his entry on finally arriving there: “Great God! this is an awful place.”

  But, man! When I read their books, I kept thinking how lucky they were to be exploring in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when nearly all of the Arctic and the Antarctic was still unknown. I was sure that it was I who had been born too late, not Scott or Shackleton. Even the 1950s, when climbers were making the first ascents of the 8,000-meter peaks, loomed for me like a lost heyday. Exploration then seemed simpler, yet more dangerous. Off you went into some little-known region on the map, or toward the top of some unclimbed peak, without being able to send a word back home. You returned home months or even years later. Now we have sat phones, up-to-the-minute weather forecasts, and online dispatches from the field. It seems that we’re as much burdened by technology as we are helped by it, and it becomes a crutch to make up for missing skills—just as, for example, the GPS has replaced the compass.

  When, as a teenager, I read Charlie Houston and Bob Bates’s K2: The Savage Mountain, I thought how fortunate those guys were that as late as 1953, the second-highest mountain in the world was still unclimbed. In my mind, there was nothing arbitrary about that kind of goal. Traveling by dogsled, you can’t see the north pole from a distance—you have to be almost on top of it before you know what it looks like. Even then, you don’t actually “see” the pole. You need to make sextant sightings and triangulate your position before you can honestly say that you are standing on or at least reasonably close to the pole.

  But I’d “seen” K2 ever since I’d first opened a book and looked at the famous picture of it from the 1909 expedition: K2 from Windy Gap, looking impossibly big and beautiful, a photo often attributed to Vittorio Sella but actually taken by the Duke of the Abruzzi (see photo insert, between pages 150 and 151). Even as a teenager, I understood that to try to get to the highest windblown point in that glass-plate picture would take all the suffering in the world.

  By the time I started climbing in 1977, all fourteen of the highest mountains in the world had long since been ascended. (Shishapangma was the last to fall, to the Chinese in 1964.) All the highest mountains in Alaska and Canada had been climbed. I don’t think there was a single summit in the Cascades of Washington State—my first stomping grounds—that hadn’t been reached. It was hard not to feel that I’d been born too late.

  For Whymper, or Mummery, or Mallory, or even Fritz Wiessner, “mountaineer” was an unambiguous label. Mallory was the guiding force on the first three Everest expeditions, but he was also the best rock climber of his day in Great Britain. Wiessner had been one of the best rock climbers in the world as a teenager, one of the best alpinists in his twenties, and one of the best Himalayan climbers in his thirties. Climbing had yet to be subdivided into specialized disciplines.

  By the 1980s, however, that subdividing was well under way, and by now it’s become extreme. Some young rope gun at Red River Gorge in Kentucky, trying to put up an 80-foot route that’s rated 5.14c in difficulty, knows almost nothing about the Himalaya. And guys who, like me, have specialized in 8,000-meter peaks know very little about Red River Gorge, or Hueco Tanks in Texas, or Mount Charleston in Nevada. We’re all still “climbers,” but our fraternities (and sororities) are so specialized that we scarcely understand one another’s jargon.

  In 2009, there are serious climbers all over the world who’ve never climbed outdoors. Instead, they concentrate on artificial walls in climbing gyms, gearing up for “comps”—competitions complete with referees, stopwatches, and “isolation chambers” (so that one jock doesn’t get the benefit of watching another try the route of the day). There’s another whole gang composed of those who climb outdoors, but never use ropes. They’re into “bouldering”—doing the hardest sequences of moves possible on boulders lying in the woods. Boulderers rarely get more than 30 feet off the ground, and they’re secured by buddies spotting them and by springy crash pads laid out on the ground.

  “Sport climbers” use ropes, and tackle routes ranging from one pitch to a dozen or more on real cliffs or “crags,” but they rely for safety on expansion bolts previously drilled into the rock every six feet or so. These athletes, like boulderers, are into the pure pursuit of difficulty, and the risks they incur are almost nonexistent.

  “Trad climbers”—”trad” is for “traditional”—disdain the conne
ct-the-dots bolted routes and insist instead on placing their own protection (“pro,” in the jargon of the trade), in the form of nuts and cams wedged into cracks to shorten a potential fall. These climbers think of themselves as purists, in touch with the long legacy of their pastime, and for them risk is a real issue. If your “pro” isn’t good, a fall can result in serious injury or even death.

  I served my mountaineering apprenticeship as a trad climber. First at Devils Lake in Wisconsin with my high school pal Rich King, and then on more alpine routes in the Cascades of Washington State, I learned the basics of rope work, belaying, rappelling, and placing “pro.” All these skills would help me immensely when I turned to the highest peaks in the world.

  Trad climbers overlap with “big-wall climbers,” who work out long routes on massive cliffs such as El Capitan in Yosemite. Those routes can take several days, but there’s also a subgroup of people who are into doing big routes in the fastest possible time. On El Cap, every major route has its speed record, and those times are coveted prizes for the men and women who go after them.

  I suppose that true mountaineering begins with “alpine climbing.” Alpine warriors set their sights on fiendishly difficult routes in ranges such as the Alps, the Canadian Rockies, and the Fitz Roy Massif of Patagonia. Here, “objective hazards”—everything from avalanches to falling rocks to storms—play a critical role. At the cutting edge, alpinism is a very dangerous sport. (It’s somewhere on this spectrum that we stop being comfortable with calling climbing a “sport.” We don’t know exactly what to call it—a “pastime,” a “pursuit,” an “adventure”? “Sport” conjures up baseball or golf. Mountaineering is a way of life.)