K2

by Ed Viesturs

  Alpinists are interested in beautiful “lines” on major mountains, but the height of the mountain above sea level is pretty irrelevant. Some of the scariest and most challenging peaks in the world, like Cerro Torre in Patagonia, are only about 9,000 or 10,000 feet high. And sometimes climbers will complete a difficult new route on an alpine peak but won’t bother to go to the summit. The route itself becomes the goal.

  Finally you get to my group, which we might call Himalayan or high-altitude climbers. Even within our coterie, there are subgroups. There are guys like the American Steve House, who with one partner climbed the notorious Rupal Face on Nanga Parbat alpine-style, but who’s also done very hard new routes on smaller peaks in Alaska and Canada. He’s taken the technical skills he’s honed on lower peaks and applied them to 8,000ers. I admire House immensely, but I don’t have the technical skill or the interest to attack some unclimbed face in the Great Gorge of the Ruth Glacier just south of Mount McKinley. And House has no interest, as far as I can tell, in climbing all fourteen 8,000ers.

  From the start, technical climbing per se didn’t hold a great appeal for me. I didn’t ever pursue it seriously enough to know whether I could have become a top rock climber. But I loved a physical challenge, especially if it involved commitment over the long haul—not just several days but weeks or months. That’s why, I think, I gravitated to the 8,000ers, starting with my first attempt on Everest in 1987. That was a huge step, but a logical one, beyond Mount Rainier, where I’d been guiding since 1982. (Some of my fellow RMI guides also turned to 8,000-meter peaks, but they were the exception, not the norm.)

  And from the start, I felt instinctively that I wanted to climb those big mountains in as pure a style as possible—without the aid of supplementary oxygen, without the support of Sherpas hauling my loads, and on expeditions that I organized myself. When I go around the country giving slide shows, a lot of people in the audience assume that what I called Endeavor 8000—my quest for all fourteen 8,000ers—was a project I had formulated from the start. Not so: I was three or four peaks into the roster before I could envision a way of completing the whole cycle. And when Annapurna started to seem my “nemesis,” as I called it, I would have been willing to walk away with only thirteen under my belt.

  Of course, it was gratifying to become the first American to climb all fourteen, and only the sixth mountaineer in the world to do so without bottled oxygen. Maybe I hadn’t been born too late after all! I can imagine some young guy in, say, 2025 reading about my era in the Himalaya and the Karakoram and saying to himself, “Damn it, imagine what it must have been like when no other American had been on top of all the 8,000ers. I guess I was born too late….”

  I did gain a fair amount of attention after I completed the cycle of 8,000ers, appearing on talk shows such as Charlie Rose, the Today show, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And my book about the quest, No Shortcuts to the Top, generated an unbelievable amount of fan mail, mostly from nonclimbers. But I was first surprised, then hurt when I started to realize that in a certain small portion of the climbing world, there was a nasty backlash against my modest celebrity. I’d hear thirdhand that so-and-so had said, “Big fucking deal. So Viesturs climbed the standard route on Cho Oyu. Why doesn’t he try something new or really difficult?” Nobody ever said anything quite like that to my face. So I was sort of left sputtering my answer into the void. I was tempted to say to a critic like that, “Okay, dude, why don’t you try climbing three 8,000ers in two months.” (That’s what I’d done in 1995.) I’ve never claimed to be anything I’m not. I’ve never pretended to be a brilliant rock climber. And I’ve never put other climbers down, or denigrated their achievements.

  Some of these critics seemed to operate from a double standard. They’d imply that I wasn’t a complete climber if I hadn’t done El Cap or led a 5.13 rock climb. Yet they themselves had never set foot on an 8,000-meter peak, let alone climbed one without supplemental oxygen. I’ve endured risks and hardships on 8,000ers that some other climbers could never imagine.

  In the past, one climber would applaud another simply for succeeding, whether it meant putting up a new route or lending his face to an ad for an energy bar. We all pulled for one another to “make it.” A lot of the more recent sniping and criticism seems to be based on ignorance, jealousy, or just having too much free time with nothing else to do or talk about.

  Mountaineering is too wonderful an endeavor, and too personal a one, you’d think, to be sullied by petty jealousies and one-upsmanship. And yet, from its very earliest years, climbing has been afflicted with intense competitiveness, and has generated the kind of controversy and even mudslinging that, for instance, Wiessner endured after the 1939 K2 expedition.

  To mountaineers of the generations before mine, making the first ascent of a mountain was the ultimate accomplishment. The first ascent of Everest, in 1953, is still far and away the most celebrated deed in climbing history. And in my own generation, there were guys (and gals) who focused their passions on finding beautiful unclimbed mountains around the world and figuring out how to get to the top of them. As the 1980s slid into the ‘90s and then into the twenty-first century, though, these pioneers had to head off to more and more remote ranges—the Tien Shan of western China, for example, or the high valleys of Kyrgyzstan, or the glacial massifs of Baffin Island—to find worthy unclimbed prizes.

  That was never my game. In fact, I confess that I’ve never made a first ascent of a peak anywhere in the world. On the whole, I don’t feel that I’ve missed an essential part of the mountaineering experience by not having done so. I’ve always thought that even if I’m on a peak that has been climbed before, I’m making my own personal “first ascent.” That’s the intrigue of adventure—doing something you’ve never done before.

  Yet when I think back to 1953, and imagine Houston and Bates and their teammates setting off for K2, full of confidence that at last they would be the men to make the first ascent of one of the greatest and hardest mountains in the world, a little bit of that teenage envy creeps back. Wouldn’t that have been a glorious summer to hike up the Baltoro Glacier? Maybe after all I was born too late….

  From 1939 to 1945, mountaineering pretty much shut down worldwide. There was mountain warfare waged in the Alps—the famous Tenth Mountain Division was hatched as part of the World War II effort, enlisting many of the best American climbers—but scrambling up a steep slope to attack an enemy entrenched on a rocky crest is not the same thing as climbing a great peak “because it is there.”

  The few exceptions during the war years include some extraordinary adventures. One of the classics of our literature is Felice Benuzzi’s No Picnic on Mount Kenya, which I read early on in my own climbing career. It’s the true story of three Italian prisoners of war interred in a British camp in Kenya. From the grounds, every day they could see Mount Kenya—a 17,058-foot peak that’s a serious climb, unlike the more famous Kilimanjaro—towering above them. In January 1943, they escaped from the camp just so they could climb the mountain. They spent eighteen days working their way up its cliffs and couloirs, but were defeated short of the summit. Rather than continue their escape deeper into the African wilderness, the three men hiked back to the British camp and turned themselves in. For their troubles, each of them spent twenty-eight days in solitary confinement.

  Even after the war, mountaineering was slow to return to the Himalaya. And the painful separation of Pakistan from India in 1947 made the Karakoram off-limits to outsiders for years. It was not until 1950 that the first postwar expedition to any 8,000-meter peak took place.

  Charlie Houston had never gotten K2 out of his blood. For years after the war, he tried to wangle a permit from the government of Pakistan. One huge obstacle was that the battle between India and Pakistan for control of Kashmir rendered the old approach route from Srinagar out of the question for foreigners. Ironically, however, the same struggle turned the sleepy village of Skardu into a military outpost, complete wi
th a modern airstrip. The first postwar expedition to K2 would not have to hike 360 miles to reach base camp but could fly in to Skardu—as virtually all expeditions have done ever since.

  Houston was convinced that if Wiessner, at the head of a very weak team, had been able to get within 750 vertical feet of the summit, with only easy terrain above, a stronger team with far better equipment would almost surely succeed on the Abruzzi Ridge. But a permit for K2 seemed so remote a possibility that Houston applied instead to Nepal for permission to attempt Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain. (It would first be climbed by a French team led by the great Lionel Terray in 1955.) Yet even as he was preparing for Makalu, Houston finally succeeded, with the aid of the American ambassador to Pakistan, in winning a permit for K2 for the summer of 1953.

  In choosing a team for the 1938 expedition, Houston had relied on recommendations from Harvard friends and from colleagues who were higher-ups in the AAC. For the 1953 expedition, he was determined to put together not only the strongest team possible but a group of men who would get along well together. That was a stroke of genius. A team made up of members who like and trust one another will always be more successful than a team built solely on the skills of the climbers. So in 1953 the selection process ended up being more far-ranging and democratic but also more exhaustive than that of any American mountaineering expedition to that date.

  There was no question that Bob Bates would be on board. Through the war years, Bates and Houston had stayed the closest of friends, and Bates was as keen for another crack at K2 as was his former Harvard chum. By the summer of 1953, though, Bates was forty-two years old; Houston was thirty-nine. That’s not really old in Himalayan climbing terms, and both men were in excellent shape. But to round out the team, Houston and Bates sought younger men.

  The AAC put out a nationwide notice soliciting applications for the five remaining slots on the K2 expedition. In the end, Houston and Bates weighed the credentials of more than twenty-five candidates. By 1952, Houston had set up a medical practice in Exeter, New Hampshire. As a rather draconian requirement for consideration for K2, he demanded that every would-be teammate travel (at his own expense) to Exeter to interview in person with the leader.

  One of the men who was ultimately accepted was Dee Molenaar, a thirty-four-year-old climber with a solid record of first ascents in the Northwest and the Sierra Nevada who’d also been on the second ascent in 1946 of 18,008-foot Mount Saint Elias, the third-highest peak in Alaska or Canada. (The first ascent, of course, was led by the Duke of the Abruzzi way back in 1897.) In the fall of 1952, Molenaar left his job as climbing ranger on Mount Rainier to accept a new post in Colorado Springs as an adviser to the army’s Mountain and Cold Weather Training Command. A modest fellow, Molenaar was surprised when friends urged him to apply for K2.

  Dee and I have become really good friends. No one was more supportive of my efforts during Endeavor 8000 than he was. A couple of months after I’d climbed K2, Dee gave me a typed copy of his own K2 diary from 1953, with a really warm inscription to “another Rainier guide who’s gone on to higher challenges and with great success.”

  At the beginning of his typed diary, in an introduction called “K2 Prelude,” Dee recalls the tryout process:

  I submitted an application, feeling full well there was really little chance I’d be accepted, in view of the great number of other applicants, most younger and “in-their-prime.” … Also, because Houston and Bates wanted to personally meet all applicants before confirming any choices—and I couldn’t afford a trip East just to be interviewed and meet them…. But Bob Craig wrote them and supported my application. And while Craig and I were [later] working at Camp Drum, NY, I had a weekend visit with Charlie and Bates in Exeter, NH, where we hit it off right from the start.

  Out of the Exeter screening process a legend was born, to the effect that it was Houston’s dog, a golden retriever named Honey, that made the final choices. In 2007, Houston admitted to his biographer Bernadette McDonald, “It’s true that our dog didn’t like the people we didn’t like. But that’s as far as it went.” Houston’s wife, Dorcas, also made sharp appraisals of the visiting candidates. “She had a very good feel for quality people,” Houston told McDonald.

  Dee did indeed end up being chosen for the team without a tryout in Exeter, on the strong recommendation of his old buddy and fellow Rainier guide Bob Craig, who had already been accepted. By 1952, Craig was a twenty-eight-year-old ski instructor living in Aspen whose 1946 climbs of Devils Thumb and Kates Needle on the Alaska-Canada border already stood as two of the finest alpine first ascents ever performed by an American. George Bell, twenty-seven years old, was a physics professor at Cornell who had been on major expeditions to the Andes. Twenty-six-year-old Art Gilkey, from Iowa, was a geologist who had done hard routes in the Tetons and glacial research in Alaska. Pete Schoening, a chemical engineer, also twenty-six years old, was probably the strongest climber chosen for the team. In addition to numerous first ascents and new routes in the Cascades, he had been a member of the 1952 party that made the first ascent of King Peak in the Yukon, one of the highest mountains in the remote and massively glaciated Saint Elias Range.

  Houston and Bates meant what they’d said about valuing the ability to get along above technical skill and ambition. One of the candidates for K2 who was rejected was Fred Beckey. Thirty years old in 1953, Beckey had a more stellar record of first ascents all over the United States and Canada than any other American climber his age. As a nineteen-year-old in 1942, with his seventeen-year-old brother as his only partner, Beckey had made an astounding second ascent of Mount Waddington, six years after Fritz Wiessner and Bill House had made the first ascent. In 1946, Beckey had been the driving force on Devils Thumb and Kates Needle. On his first attempt on the soaring granite spire of the Thumb, Beckey had paired up with Fritz Wiessner, the only time the two men who were probably the country’s finest mountaineers of their day shared a rope. But on the approach hike, as he thrashed his way through a fiendish tangle of devil’s club, Wiessner twisted and badly injured his knee. He pushed on to the base of the mountain but had to give up the attempt—one of the sorest disappointments of his climbing life. Beckey returned a few weeks later with Bob Craig and a third partner and bagged the first ascent.

  No matter how strong he was as a climber, however, Beckey had a reputation as a headstrong, eccentric man with a quick temper. Houston never went on record as to why he turned down Beckey’s application, but on the Abruzzi Ridge one day that summer, Pete Schoening would declare that he wished Beckey had been chosen for the team.

  Still alive and still climbing at age eighty-six, Beckey today has by far the longest and most distinguished record of first ascents of previously unclimbed peaks of any American ever. And his reputation as a difficult eccentric still clings to him like glue. I don’t know Beckey, but I’ve always admired his climbs.

  Rounding out the party was Tony Streather, a twenty-seven-year-old British transport officer who had spent many years in Pakistan and India. Like Norman Streatfeild in 1938, Streather would be invaluable in hiring and dealing with porters. His only previous mountaineering expedition had been with a Norwegian team that in 1950 made the first ascent of 25,289-foot Tirich Mir, the highest peak in the Hindu Kush, the range adjoining the Karakoram on the west. Streather had performed so well that he had reached the summit with several of the Norwegians. On K2, he would climb as an equal with his American teammates.

  In Rawalpindi on June 2, the team got electrifying news over the radio: Everest had been climbed by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Many decades later, Houston would tell Bernadette McDonald, “It was thrilling news, but, I must confess, I had a secret unworthy thought that this would upstage any triumph we might have in a few more months.” That day, however, Molenaar wrote in his diary, “Good news to mountaineers…. Now K2 is the highest unclimbed mountain. We’re determined to carry on our plans as before, and without bottled oxygen, which the Everesters had us
ed.”

  On June 3, the party landed in a DC-3 at the Skardu airport. In the hour-and-a-half flight from Rawalpindi, the team had solved an approach that had taken the 1938 team two weeks and 220 miles on foot. At the airport, the climbers were greeted by cheering Pakistanis carrying banners, one of which read, “We appeal our American friends to solve Kashmir Problem.”

  In Skardu, the team recruited Balti porters for the hike in to base camp. They also hired ten Hunzas, men from mountain valleys near Gilgit, upstream from Skardu on the Indus River, to perform as high-altitude porters. Six of the best Hunzas were to play the role undertaken by the Sherpa in 1938 and 1939. In 1953, Sherpa were unavailable for K2, because Pakistan would not permit them to enter the country, thanks to the simmering antagonism with India. Because the Hunzas were so much less experienced than the men from Nepal, Houston and Bates decided that no high-altitude porter would go above Camp III, at 20,700 feet. On the hike in to Askole, Molenaar and Craig took time out to run “a climbing school for 8 Hunzas on a nearby boulder.”

  It took the team seven days, unhindered by porter strikes, to reach Askole. Before the expedition, the seven Americans had known each other other only in pairs—Houston and Bates had climbed together, as had Craig and Molenaar, but in no other pairing had two men shared a rope, and most of them were strangers. But as Craig later wrote in the official expedition account,

  As we approached our mountain, the magic cement that binds men together, the qualities which make unbreakable friendships began to form. Unconsciously, and imperceptibly, we were forming a team. If we had not it is probable that most of us would not have survived the troubles that we were to face.