K2

by Ed Viesturs

  It took only a small misstep to trigger the whole chaotic accident. George Bell, who had lost all feeling in his feet, began downclimbing hard ice to aid in the maneuvering of Gilkey. He slipped, lost his balance, and started plummeting down the slope. The rope came tight to Streather and pulled him off his stance. Streather frantically tried to self-arrest but couldn’t get any purchase with the pick of his ax.

  As the two men careened out of control down the mountain, their rope intersected with that linking Houston and Bates, pulling it tight. With no time to prepare, first Houston and then Bates were plucked off their feet. Four men were now hurtling toward what seemed certain death. Bates later wrote, “This is it! I thought as I landed heavily on my pack. There was nothing I could do now. We had done our best, but our best wasn’t good enough. This was the end…. Only thousands of feet of empty space separated us from the glacier below.”

  The rope between Bell and Streather next snagged on the short tie-in between Molenaar and Gilkey, pulling Molenaar off his feet with a sudden jerk. Five men were now plunging in a tangled mess of ropes toward the 7,000-foot void. And two more were about to join them.

  Dee Molenaar’s watercolor sketch of the complex accident of August 10, 1953, that nearly swept seven teammates to their deaths.

  From 60 feet above Gilkey, Schoening saw what was happening. He threw himself on top of the ice ax he had jammed behind the small boulder and hung on to the rope with all his strength. The jolt came as Molenaar’s fall started to pull the helpless Gilkey down the slope. But Schoening held Gilkey in place, and the short tie-in stopped Molenaar’s fall.

  Only the fact that the jolts came in a punctuated series kept seven men from being simultaneously swept to their deaths off the Abruzzi Ridge. Schoening held on, clinging to his rope with a death grip, and one by one, each of the falling men came to a halt. By the time the chain of events was over, Bell, the one who had fallen the farthest, lay 250 feet below Schoening. (See diagram.)

  Pete Schoening’s “miracle belay” has become a legend. Nothing like it, before or since, has ever been performed in the mountains—one man with a single ax and a grip of steel stopping the otherwise fatal falls of six teammates and of himself. Schoening’s deed, which as a superbly trained climber he performed by instinct in a split-second reflex, is, simply, the most famous belay in mountaineering history.

  The men were alive. But their predicament would now drain everyone’s last reserves.

  Bell had lost his pack, his glasses, and his mittens in the fall. As he stumbled, half blind, up toward his teammates, he yelled, “My hands are freezing!” Bates and Molenaar had landed with one on top of the other, sprawled across a rocky outcrop. Before they could even guess what had happened, they heard a cry—probably from Schoening: “Get your weight off the rope!” Still holding his belay in that death grip, Schoening felt his hands starting to freeze, even with his mittens on.

  Bates unroped, climbed down to Bell, and offered him a spare pair of loosely woven wool mitts that he had carried in his parka pocket. Bell’s fingers, already “an ugly fish-belly white,” were so stiff that he needed Bates to put the mitts on his hands.

  The worst injured was Houston, whose head had struck a rock, knocking him unconscious. As Bates cautiously worked his way toward the “crumpled figure” below him, he was not sure whether his best friend was alive or dead. Bates touched Houston’s shoulder. Houston opened his eyes, then staggered to his feet. “Where are we?” he pleaded. “What are we doing here?”

  No amount of explaining from Bates seemed to penetrate Houston’s fog. He kept saying, “Where are we?” He had suffered a bad concussion and lost his short-term memory. For the rest of his life, he would be unable to remember the accident. To motivate his friend, Bates brought his face close to Houston’s and ordered, “Charlie, if you ever want to see Dorcas and Penny [Houston’s wife and daughter] again, climb up there right now!”

  With a belay from Molenaar, relying on sheer muscle memory, Houston “fairly swarmed” up the rock-and-ice slope. But when he arrived at Molenaar’s side, he repeated, “What are we doing here?”

  Much of the team’s gear had been lost in the fall. The men had only a two-man tent and a smaller bivouac tent. While one man tried to hack out a platform in the steep slope, others set to work frantically pitching the tents, which the wind threatened to rip out of their hands. Earlier, Bob Craig, who had not witnessed the accident, had looked across the slope to see it swept clean of climbers. Then he heard Schoening yelling at him to get an ice ax to anchor Gilkey. Craig soloed across the traverse and planted an ax just above Gilkey’s supine body, then tied it to the rope cradle that cushioned the man’s makeshift litter. Only then could Schoening release his hands from the rope that had stopped everyone’s fall. At once he headed down toward the inadequate campsite, for his fingers, like Bell’s, had begun to freeze.

  Craig told Gilkey that the team would return for him as soon as they got the tents pitched. Privately, he wondered how the men, in their newly battered state, would ever manage to drag their inert teammate across that dangerous slope. A few minutes later, Streather planted a second ax to improve Gilkey’s anchor.

  While the men hacked away at their platform, they heard Gilkey, out of sight around a small rock rib, call out several times, but the wind made it impossible for them to understand what he was saying. Bates later wrote, “Gilkey sounded as if he were shouting encouragement, but the wind blurred his words, as it must have muffled our answering shouts to him.”

  About ten minutes after hearing Gilkey’s last shout, Bates, Craig, and Streather roped up and traversed the slope. They turned the rib and moved cautiously toward the victim. “What we saw there I shall never forget,” Bates wrote. “The whole slope was bare of life. Art Gilkey was gone!”

  As they stared at this blankness, the men noticed a new groove in the ice. The conclusion was obvious: in the time between Gilkey’s last shout and the trio’s arrival to rescue him, an avalanche had scoured the edge of the rock rib, taking the helpless victim with it. Even the two anchoring ice axes were gone. “It was as if the hand of God had swept him away,” Bates later wrote.

  The three men returned to camp with the news. As shocking as it was, the team could not dwell on it, for they still faced the ordeal of getting through the night. Four men piled into the two-man tent, with only one air mattress among them; Bates opened his sleeping bag and draped it over the four men like a down comforter. The other three men were jammed even more tightly inside the minuscule bivouac tent.

  Houston had suffered not only a concussion but a hemorrhage that blurred the vision in his right eye, as well as cracked ribs that made breathing painful. Molenaar had also cracked his ribs, and had received a head wound and a deep gash in his thigh. Bell was sure that both his hands and his feet were frostbitten, and he was so myopic that he was virtually blind without his glasses. Nobody slept all night.

  Houston was out of his head. He became convinced that he had to cut his way out of the tent, or else everyone in it would suffocate. When his teammates physically restrained him, Houston raved, “Leave me alone. I’m a doctor, I know about these things.” Later in the night, as if half-returned to his senses, he intermittently blurted out, “How’s Pete?” Bates recalled,

  I would say, “He’s all right,” but Charlie wouldn’t believe me. Then I would call across to the tiny bivouac tent, which was swelled to bursting by the three men inside, “Hey, Pete, tell Charlie you’re all right.”

  Pete Schoening would call out, “I’m fine, Charlie. Don’t worry about me.”

  A dozen times that night, Houston repeated, “How’s Pete?” Then he would lie quiet for a while, only to cry out, “How’s Tony?” And even “How’s Art?”

  Somehow the men got through the night. They managed to melt snow and brew up tea, which they passed from one tent to the other. The wind dropped, but in the morning the sky was a leaden gray, presaging yet another storm. It would take a dogged effort simply
to pack up and start down the dangerous slopes leading to Camp VI.

  There was not even an ice ax for every man. The most seriously injured, Houston was still drifting in and out of reality, so Schoening and Craig tied him into the middle of a three-man rope, and Schoening, coming last, belayed Houston on every tricky stretch. The team leader stopped several times, sat down, and, as Bates observed, “put his chin in his hand, and looked around as if to say, ‘What are we doing here?’” Schoening would exhort, “Come on, Charlie. Let’s go!” Houston would rise wearily to his feet and continue the descent.

  Though none of them said a word to each other, each man realized that Gilkey’s disappearance had probably saved their own lives. Even more disturbingly, as they covered the ground below their emergency Camp VII, the men climbed past splotches of blood stuck to the snow and the protruding rocks. None of them mentioned this grim memento mori until decades later. But that night, Dee wrote in his diary, “Enroute down, we passed a tangle of ropes and torn sleeping bag that had held Art, with track of blood speckling snow below, indicating he had died quickly. Poor Art. We all passed by this wreckage silently.”

  It took the team five days to limp down the mountain. That they pulled off that descent without another accident is a tribute not only to the toughness of those seven men but to the depth of their solicitude for one another. Still, when they reached base camp on August 15, they were a demoralized crew, with the pall of defeat heavy on their spirits and the weight of sorrow over the loss of their teammate even heavier.

  On a small ridge above base camp, the Hunzas built a rock cairn as a memorial to Art Gilkey. Over the years since 1953, plaques commemorating other climbers who died on K2 have been added to the cairn. The memorial has become a solemn shrine for all the expedition members who place their base camps on the Godwin Austen Glacier.

  I think I was sixteen when I read K2: The Savage Mountain. I was so impressed by the story that in a high school class in expository writing, when the teacher assigned us to write a play, I wrote about K2, with the plot revolving around the dilemma of having to leave somebody behind on the mountain. What really inspired me about those guys on the 1953 expedition is how they took care of one another, how they bonded in adversity. Later I would realize that there was a kind of military model for their courage, in the motto “Leave no man behind.”

  But you can’t teach that kind of morality. Those guys were all selfless by nature. They all had high ethical standards. I’m sure their example helped me form my own moral principles, so that much later, when I had to put aside my personal ambitions to go to the aid of another climber in trouble, I did so without hesitation. I know I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try to help out when I had the chance.

  In 1992, when Scott and I were climbing above our Camp III toward the Shoulder, we suddenly realized that we were traversing the very slope where Schoening had stopped the interlinked falls of his six teammates and where Gilkey had been swept away by the avalanche. We slowed down as we discussed just how those events must have unfolded thirty-nine years before. The slope was self-evidently a treacherous place, and in that moment, it came home to us just how hopeless it would be to try to carry a completely incapacitated teammate down the mountain.

  Houston was right in that grim passage about his thoughts after diagnosing Gilkey’s thrombophlebitis: “There was no hope, absolutely none. Art was crippled…. We could not carry him down.” In 1992, we had gotten Gary Ball, stricken with pulmonary edema, down that same stretch through the Black Pyramid. But Gary was still mobile all the way down to Camp II. We weren’t lowering him in a makeshift litter, as the 1953 team was with Gilkey. Gary could still walk, and could hold on to the rope I anchored, using it like a handrail. It was only when we arrived at Camp I, at 20,000 feet, that Gary collapsed and became a litter case. As the American team had with Gilkey, we then wrapped Gary in a sleeping bag and lowered him down the snowy slopes through the night. By that point there were six of us lowering and another climber at Gary’s side to steer him onto the right course.

  The only time Pete Schoening wrote about K2 was in a small booklet, limited to about a hundred copies and intended only for close friends, which was published after his death in 2004. That work, however, reveals Schoening’s lifelong conviction that the team could have gotten Gilkey down the mountain: “It would have taken longer than descending by ourselves and frostbite would have been more severe. But based on experience doing rescues on steep terrain, I believe we could have done it.”

  Whether or not Schoening’s faith in the team’s rescue capabilities is realistic, I’m convinced that had Gilkey not collapsed, the 1953 team would have made the first ascent of K2. They had been so successful in getting all eight climbers to 25,500 feet that I believe that, even with the stretch of bad weather that began on August 3, they could have gotten at least two men to the summit.

  I also think the 1953 team was accurate in their private realization that Gilkey’s death in the avalanche might have saved their own lives. Decades after the expedition, a provocative theory started to circulate in the mountaineering world, proposed first by Tom Hornbein, Houston’s friend and the man who, with Willi Unsoeld, completed the astonishing first traverse of Everest by the west ridge in 1963. Hornbein wondered whether Gilkey, realizing what a fix his comrades were in after the accident, might have “taken the opportunity to disconnect himself from the mountainside to which he had been secured,” sacrificing himself to save his teammates.

  If Hollywood were to make a movie about the ‘53 expedition, that would be the crowning touch, the perfect embodiment of what Houston would come to call “the brotherhood of the rope.” His teammates had briefly speculated about this possibility shortly after they’d discovered that Gilkey was gone. But Bates and Houston decided that it was very unlikely.

  I agree with them. First of all, Gilkey was so swaddled up in his sleeping bag, he might have found it impossible to free his arms. And even if he had had a knife, could he have reached out and cut the rope with it? If he had, the ice axes anchoring him should have still been in place when Bates, Craig, and Streather arrived on the scene. But the axes vanished with Gilkey. Alternatively, it’s barely conceivable that Gilkey could have wrenched the axes loose with his hands. By then, however, he was probably too weak to do so, and that morning Houston had given him a dose of morphine to dull the pain.

  Dee’s diary, written without the benefit of retrospect, is unequivocal: “After the wounded were in tents, Craig, Tony and Bates go out to bring Art in, or make him comfortable for the night. But they found the slope bare—a rock or snow avalanche had taken him down. Art is gone, dead.”

  At base camp, the men congregated to discuss every last detail of their recollections of what had happened high on the mountain between August 7 and 10, and they captured their discourse on a tape recorder. On the CD called The Brotherhood of the Rope, which Houston produced in 2004, you hear the voices of the men speaking in that discussion. Some of the comments are deeply moving.

  The seven survivors got back to Rawalpindi on August 28, then went their separate ways. But they stayed friends for the rest of their lives. (There aren’t many expeditions that can make that claim.) And in 1978, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the trip, all seven held a joyful and poignant reunion in the Wind River Range of Wyoming.

  In 1993, forty years after the expedition, members of a British team found Art Gilkey’s bones on the Godwin Austen Glacier, not far from base camp. During the decades, his corpse had migrated with the ice four miles from the place where he had come to rest after his titanic plunge.

  At the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival that November, Charlie Houston gave the first of what would become a hugely popular series of “armchair talks.” Dispensing with the usual slide show, Houston simply sat in a comfortable, well-upholstered chair and answered questions from the moderator, Geoff Powter, who was the editor of the Canadian Alpine Journal.

  I wasn’t there for that talk
, but a friend who was later recounted what happened so vividly, I almost felt like I was present. Powter skillfully lobbed his questions so that they covered Houston’s long and glorious career as a mountaineer and as the world’s leading expert in high-altitude medicine, giving him a chance to tell his war stories. By now, Houston was eighty years old, a living legend, and the audience hung on his every word.

  In that audience was Barry Blanchard, one of Canada’s best mountaineers. He had been on K2 the previous summer and had participated in the recovery of Gilkey’s remains. Blanchard waited through the Q & A period at the end of Houston’s talk, until Powter said, “Okay, one more question.” Then he stood up, introduced himself, and told the story of finding Gilkey’s body. Barry is normally a confident speaker, but his voice quavered as he announced the discovery, which was news to almost everyone in the crowd. He ended by telling Houston that the climbers on the glacier just two and a half months earlier had recovered Gilkey’s bones and brought them back to the United States, for eventual burial in a family plot.

  Then Barry sat down. It was obvious that he hoped Houston would greet the stunning news of the discovery with an emotion matching his own, and perhaps even express heartfelt gratitude. As Barry had spoken, Houston had stared into the audience in the direction of his voice. By then, Houston was almost blind, so it’s doubtful that he could even see the face of the guy who had made the announcement about Gilkey.