by Ed Viesturs
For long moments, Houston didn’t say a word. The audience held its collective breath. Finally, in a cold, even voice, Houston said, “Frankly, I wish you had left him the way you found him.” Barry was devastated.
One reason why K2: The Savage Mountain is such a great book, one of the true classics of mountaineering literature, is that Houston and Bates (and Craig and Bell, who contributed a chapter each) tell their story in such a straightforward manner. The very directness of the prose animates the drama of the book. There’s no bluster, no bragging, not a whiff of nationalistic bravado in the telling of what, for each of its participants, was the adventure of a lifetime. At the core, all eight of those climbers were modest men.
So even though the expedition ended in failure and tragedy, the lessons it taught several younger generations of American climbers were inspiring ones. “The brotherhood of the rope” that Houston celebrates was no sentimental invention—it was the lifelong bond that their terrible ordeal on K2 forged among its seven survivors. The book affected me hugely. When I first started going on expeditions, I realized that even more important than getting to the summit was the chance to have a great adventure with partners I really liked and trusted. And I found that again and again, with teammates such as David Breashears, J.-C. Lafaille, Rob Hall, and Veikka Gustafsson.
In 1979, Nick Clinch, who led the team that made the first ascent of Gasherbrum I, in 1958 (the only 8,000er first climbed by Americans), and who would later serve as president of the AAC, eloquently summed up the legacy Houston and his teammates had left behind them:
In my opinion, the high point of American mountaineering remains the 1953 American Expedition to K2. The courage, devotion and team spirit of that expedition have yet to be surpassed, and still represent the standards of conduct toward which all American mountaineers should aspire.
6
THE PRICE OF CONQUEST
You would think that after the ordeal of 1953, Charlie Houston would never have wanted to go near K2 again. On the contrary, the tragedy only deepened his fixation on the mountain. His passion for K2 was the equal of Mallory’s for Everest. Houston applied for and received a permit to put together yet another expedition in 1955.
In the meantime, however, Pakistan granted the Italians permission for the summer of 1954. After three expeditions, Americans may have come to feel that K2 was “their” mountain, but the Italians had a proprietary stake themselves in the world’s second-highest peak. On top of the pioneering effort by the Duke of the Abruzzi’s team in 1909, Italy had fielded a massive exploratory expedition to the region in 1929. Led by another nobleman, the Duke of Spoleto, this campaign remains somewhat mysterious. In K2: The Story of the Savage Mountain, Jim Curran calls it a “debacle,” and summarizes its history in a few pithy sentences:
Originally planned for 1928 to mark the tenth anniversary of the end of the First World War, the expedition was also to coincide with one to the North Pole. K2 and/or Broad Peak were to be the objectives but internal strife caused the grandiose project to be modified, and then postponed for a year. In the end it became lamely designated the “Italian Geographical Expedition to the Karakoram,” with no mountaineering objectives at all.
The leader of the 1954 expedition was Professor Ardito Desio, a geologist teaching at the University of Milan. (Desio would always insist that “Professor” be prefixed to his name.) Fifty-seven years old that summer, he was a tireless explorer of remote regions who had already led eleven scientific expeditions to Asia and Africa. His climbing résumé was distinctly thin, but, as he bragged in his thumbnail bio in the official book about the 1954 expedition, he was “the author of three hundred publications on geology, geography and paleontology.” Desio was also a veteran of the 1929 Karakoram adventure, during which he and a single companion had hiked up the Godwin Austen Glacier to its head, as they carefully studied the Abruzzi Ridge.
When the French team led by Maurice Herzog climbed Annapurna, in 1950—the first 8,000er ever to be ascended—that triumph had a gigantic impact on the people of France. The climbers returned to wild celebrations that diminished not at all over the subsequent months. It is not an exaggeration to say that Annapurna meant to France what putting the first man on the moon meant to America. And the reason for that frenzy had everything to do with France’s emergence from World War II as a battered country that had been occupied by the hated Nazis for four and a half years. The victory on Annapurna gave a whole nation an incalculable boost of self-esteem.
In its own way, Hillary and Tenzing’s ascent of Everest in 1953 had a comparable impact on the British public, especially when (thanks to a brilliant system of couriers and coded messages organized by the Times reporter James Morris) the news arrived back in England just in time to be announced in the middle of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. (One wag later called it “the last great day of the British Empire.”)
The 1950s were an intensely nationalistic decade, and the politics between countries inevitably crept into the world of sports. I wasn’t born until three years later, but some of my elders had vivid recollections of the 1956 Olympics, when the Russians and the Hungarians tried to kill each other in their water polo match.
Like France, but for different reasons, Italy was a battered country after World War II. Everyone old enough to have lived through it would never forget the sting of losing the war, climaxed by Mussolini’s body being hung upside down on a meat hook from the roof of a gas station in Milan. Professor Desio was thus fully aware of the potential value in national pride should Italians make the first ascent of K2.
But Desio was a geologist first and foremost, a mountaineer second. So once he was put in charge of the 1954 expedition, he conceived it as a joint scientific and climbing mission, with completely separate goals to be carried out simultaneously. Along with eleven mountaineers, a cameraman, and a medical officer, the K2 expedition would assemble five scientists, whose disciplines ranged from anthropology to petrography.
Making arcane discoveries about the rate of flow of a certain glacier or the linguistics of Balti hill tribes was obviously not going to stir the blood of the Italian public the way getting up K2 would, but Desio was adamant about his scientific program. In Ascent of K2, the professor acknowledged that many observers were skeptical of his two-pronged attack on the Karakoram:
Its programme caused some bewilderment in mountaineering circles, where it was felt that so much scientific activity might seriously interfere with the work of the climbing party. That I refused to be deflected from my course was due to my conviction that success could be achieved above all by careful preparation and by an appropriate distribution of the tasks of the two teams in space and time.
That passage gives the flavor of Desio’s writing throughout the book. It’s hard for me to think of any “official” account of a dramatic expedition that’s as boring as Desio’s Ascent, or as chock-full of pompous posing and self-congratulatory slaps on the back.
An old tradition, with roots in the Victorian age, argues that exploration for its own sake is simply self-indulgence, and that every adventure in the wilderness should have a scientific purpose. The most poignant example of that faith in science that I know of comes from Robert Falcon Scott’s last expedition. When his teammates finally discovered Scott’s last camp on his return from the south pole, eight months after the leader and his four brave comrades had starved and frozen to death, they found more than thirty pounds of rocks—geological specimens—still loaded on Scott’s sledge.
By 1954, however, that tradition was almost obsolete. Certainly Houston’s and Wiessner’s expeditions to K2 had made no pretense of carrying out any scientific work (unless you count Cranmer and Sheldon’s little “geologizing” jaunt to Urdukas, which was likely nothing more than an excuse to flee base camp).
Desio took his science so seriously that he ends Ascent of K2 not with the climbers’ triumphant return to base camp and thence to civilization but with two chapters called “The Work of the
Scientists” and “Summary of the Expedition’s Scientific Researches.” While the climbers were struggling up the Abruzzi Ridge, the “professors” were puttering about the glaciers, doing things like taking magnetic observations and collecting “fauna” found above 13,000 feet. (In 1992, the only fauna we saw at base camp were goraks—huge, black ravenlike birds—and mice, and I sure didn’t feel like collecting any of them.)
Of the latter effort, Desio observes, with his habitual smugness, “I personally took part in this work, the results of which will repay study on the part of specialists.” And he closes the book not with a line like Herzog’s famous “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men” but as follows: “Only when the fruits of our labours are enshrined in the five volumes scheduled for eventual publication shall we be able to say that the expedition’s work is done.” I wonder how many people have read those five volumes—assuming they ever got published.
The professor was not only a scientist; he was a born generalissimo. On the mountain, the climbers would obey his orders to the letter, or else. Desio justified the militaristic organization of his team in a memo he sent to all the potential expedition candidates beforehand. He quotes it in full in Ascent of K2. It’s not a document that many climbers I know of would have been happy signing off on:
The need for rigid discipline will become apparent to every man once he has grasped the essential fact that everything must be subordinated to the attainment of the final goal, which is the conquest of K2. This discipline will be created by the spirit of genuine brotherhood and mutual understanding and confidence which must prevail among the members of the expedition.
Man, that’s about as far from Houston’s concept of “brotherhood” as you can get! You can’t order “genuine brotherhood and mutual understanding” to exist: it has to evolve among men, like the climbers in 1953, as they get to know each other on the mountain. In the end, the 1954 expedition would generate the polar opposite of brotherhood among the principal climbers.
That kind of military approach to the 8,000ers, however, was far more common in the 1950s than it is today. John Hunt, the leader of the 1953 Everest expedition, was selected by the Himalayan Committee of the Alpine Club for his military background. On the mountain, however, he exercised his skill not by ordering climbers around like toy soldiers but by keeping firm control over the team’s complex logistics. And Hunt never led from the rear, as Desio would. He carried loads all the way up to 27,350 feet and even contemplated trying for the summit himself. In general, an expedition chief who leads from the front and by example inspires his team.
In 1950, before they left Paris, the French climbers bound for Annapurna were required by the Club Alpin Français to swear to an oath of complete obedience to their leader, Maurice Herzog. Such freethinkers as Gaston Rébuffat and Louis Lachenal were taken aback at this demand, but they mumbled the oath anyway, knowing they had to in order to get a crack at Annapurna. On the mountain, however, Herzog constantly sought the advice of his teammates, and he led from the front all the way from base camp to the summit.
There’s no doubt that Desio was keen to climb K2. He just didn’t want to do any of the climbing himself—and at age fifty-seven, with so little alpine experience, he probably made a wise decision. In the end, despite spending ninety-one days on the Baltoro and Godwin Austen glaciers, aside from a single jaunt to Camp II, aided by fixed ropes, Desio never set foot on the Abruzzi Ridge.
But the generalissimo was nothing if not thorough. Before he even learned the outcome of Houston’s expedition, and before he knew whether his own permit for 1954 was approved (no done deal, since a number of other countries had also applied), he planned his own reconnaissance of K2 for the late summer of 1953. In Rawalpindi, Desio overlapped for a couple of days with the Americans, fresh from their defeat. They generously shared all the information about the route that Desio could have wanted.
With a single Italian companion, Desio flew to Skardu in September 1953 and undertook a thirty-two-day mini-expedition of his own, hiking with porters all the way in to the base of the Abruzzi Ridge and back out again and making several side trips along the way. The companion was Ricardo Cassin. Forty-five years old that summer, Cassin was the greatest Italian mountaineer ever to that date, and one of the greatest in the world. In the 1930s, he had led the teams that had made the first ascents of two of the classic six north faces of the Alps—the Piz Badile and the fearsome Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses, near Chamonix.
Yet in Ascent, Desio says nothing about Cassin’s contribution to the reconnaissance. And his identification of his partner is laconic in the extreme: “To accompany me on this preliminary reconnaissance I had chosen Ricardo Cassin, a climber, to whose travelling expenses the Italian Alpine Club had generously contributed.”
Upon the return of the two men to Italy, and with the official granting of the permit to Desio in October, it was universally assumed that Cassin would be the climbing leader of the 1954 expedition. The reasons for Desio’s coolness in print toward his recon partner would eventually emerge—though only if you read between the lines.
With eighteen members from Italy, comprising both climbers and scientists, Desio’s extravaganza would amount to one of the most massive expeditions ever launched in the Himalaya or the Karakoram. A comparison with the American effort the year before puts this in perspective. The Americans hired 180 porters to get their gear to base camp; the Italians would end up employing 600, and the total baggage those native porters hauled amounted to sixteen tons of food and gear. The budget for Houston’s team in 1953 was exactly $30,958.32 (the 1938 expedition had cost only a little over $9,000); although Desio never discloses the final figure, the cost of the Italian expedition was well in excess of 70 million lire, or about $108,000 in 1954 currency. That figure calculates out to $821,000 in today’s dollars—an astronomical sum, any way you look at it.
The most expensive expedition I ever went on was Jim Whittaker’s International Peace Climb of Everest in 1990, because we Americans footed the bill not only for ourselves but for the Russian and Chinese climbers as well. Far more typical of my expeditions, though, would be one like my last attempt on Annapurna, in 2005. With only three climbers on the team—Jimmy Chin, Veikka Gustafsson, and myself—that trip cost us only $18,000, even though we indulged in the luxury of helicoptering in to base camp.
Another sign of the times, and of just how nationalistic an enterprise K2 was for the Italians, emerges from the fact that a substantial part of their budget was raised by the Club Alpino Italiano (CAI), which solicited contributions from its members. That kind of appeal sure wouldn’t fly today! If I’d hit up AAC members for contributions so I could go to Annapurna in 2005, I doubt that I would have found very many checks filling my mailbox. On the other hand, in 1954 there was no such thing as a climber being sponsored by equipment companies. Nowadays, we’re on our own when it comes to raising money for an expedition—we’re no longer carrying the banner of the good old U.S. of A.
By late autumn of 1953, Desio and his cronies in the CAI had made a list of twenty-three climbers to be invited to audition for the expedition. Desio chose his scientists by word of mouth, but the climbers had to undergo a much more rigorous screening. In the winter of 1952–53, Houston had whittled his roster of applicants down from about twenty-five to five, but his process, while relatively stringent, had required only a brief interview in Exeter, New Hampshire (and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, Dee Molenaar didn’t even have to fly east to get chosen). Desio instead organized a pair of winter mountain training runs in the Alps, which doubled as tryouts. In Ascent he solemnly ticks off the qualities sought in the candidates: “good health and physical fitness, strength of character and iron determination, mental preparedness and a readiness for the task at hand based on recent mountaineering experience. All other qualities were of secondary importance.”
The candidates first assembled in mid-January on a glacial plateau near Cervinia for a ten-day camp
. The men, as Desio reported, were put through their paces as they found themselves “taking part in various climbing exercises on rocks and ice, practis[ing] setting up tents on the western spur of the Little Matterhorn, conveying packages along a specially-constructed light rope-way, communicating with one another by portable radio, etc.” At the end of the ten days, some doctors hiked up to the plateau to administer “psycho-physical tests.” Afterward, a panel of thirteen self-styled experts cut two of the candidates from the list.
To me, the whole thing sounds both brutal and ridiculous. It’s pretty tough to forge brotherhood when you’re competing with the guy on the other end of the rope for a place on the team. You can’t build an effective team based only on the skill levels of the climbers, and mutual respect and trust can’t be dictated from on high. Near the beginning of my climbing career, from 1980 to 1982, I tried out with Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. (RMI) in hopes of landing a job as a Rainier guide, and I got hired only on my third attempt. But RMI handled the whole business in a pretty humane way; the veterans explained that they were seeking a combination of people skills and mountaineering talent. Just because you were a phenomenal climber didn’t mean you would make a good guide. You had to be a patient teacher and show compassion for your clients. All of that made sense to me.
By the 1990s, no American expedition to an 8,000er had ever run its candidates through a training mill like the one Desio concocted. On the other hand, to this day the Russians—despite the collapse of the Soviet Union—maintain an equally Spartan tryout procedure. They’ll get a bunch of climbers together in the Caucasus and tell them to race one another up some mountain. The fastest six or so make the grade: “Okay, you guys get to go to Kangchenjunga.” As for brotherhood, the Russians are told, “You will get along.”
