K2

by Ed Viesturs

  I’ve participated in a number of rescues on the 8,000ers, but I sure as hell have never carried another climber on my shoulders down steep terrain! That’s an almost unimaginable feat. But Desio doesn’t even bother to mention the gutsy Hunza by name. Just one more job the men from Gilgit were expected to perform.

  As they crept higher on the Abruzzi, the climbers’ frustration with Desio’s autocratic leadership mounted. Typically, Compagnoni would radio down to base camp after each day’s effort. He and Desio would discuss the day’s events; then the leader would dictate the next day’s orders over the radio. Compagnoni relayed the command to his teammates.

  A minor mutiny eventually erupted. As Lacedelli remembers it,

  For a while we played along, but then we told Compagnoni it wouldn’t work. We said that the orders had to be based on the needs of those on the highest rope party…. “They know best what they need,” we said, “not Desio, not even you.” “I’m sorry,” Compagnoni would say, “but Desio has spoken.” “We couldn’t care less,” I said eventually.

  No one worked harder on the mountain than Walter Bonatti. And no one cared more about getting to the summit than he. But as the youngest member of the team, he knew it was unlikely that Compagnoni or Desio would choose him for a summit attempt. Throughout the expedition, moreover, relations between Bonatti and Compagnoni were cool at best.

  Despite the tensions between the climbers high on the Abruzzi and their leader typing out orders from base camp, a chain of well-stocked camps crept up the mountain. Logistical overkill can work on a mountain, in the simple sense of getting men and gear and food in place. The Italians were skilled climbers, technically perhaps a bit better than the Americans of the previous year. (Most of the Italians worked at least parttime as professional guides in the Alps, which gave them a steady climbing regimen. The Americans all had jobs or graduate school programs, from which they could escape only on weekends and holidays to hone their mountain craft.) And two of the Hunzas, Mahdi and Isakhan, performed as well at altitude as the Italians.

  On July 18, four men, including Bonatti, first reached the Shoulder, where they chose a site for Camp VIII. It was not until ten days later, however, that that camp was installed. At 25,300 feet, it stood only 200 feet lower than the Americans’ Camp VIII of the year before, where Art Gilkey had collapsed with thrombophlebitis.

  So in a few days the stage was set for what ought to have been one of the proudest accomplishments in twentieth-century exploration. Instead, what developed high on K2 during the following days would turn into a feud so sordid, bitter, and long-lasting that it has few parallels in mountaineering history.

  On July 28, Desio made radio contact with the climbers at Camp VII. But then, during the critical days that followed, the leader at base camp lost touch completely with the high camps. The Little Chief was vexed.

  As time went on we became more and more anxious. We were sorely tempted to set out in a body for the ridge, but on second thoughts we decided that it would be wiser to remain in camp with our ears glued to the radio-set, ready to intervene as and when circumstances required. We had set up the radio out in the open, on a “glacier table” [a flat rock perched on a pedestal of ice], and we tried to contact our colleagues at half-hourly intervals.

  To no avail. Just what sort of intervention Desio planned if he did make contact, only he would have known.

  Fifty-two years later, Lacedelli would shed light on the radio silence:

  At Camp VIII, we couldn’t make contact with Base Camp by radio, so we weren’t able to tell them that we had reached 7,750 meters and established Camp VIII. That day, Desio was at “Sella dei Venti” [Windy Gap] on the left side of the mountain, looking down. Then, suddenly, we heard Desio on the radio. “I haven’t got time for you,” he said, “I need to get on with my studies.” … He just got really annoyed. So I told him where he could go, and said, “From now on, if you want to know what’s going on you can come up and find out for yourself!” End of radio contact.

  Compagnoni, however, would insist that no radio communications were possible from Camp VIII and higher because the climbers no longer had line of sight to base camp.

  According to Desio’s orders, the first summit team was supposed to be Compagnoni and Ubaldo Rey, Compagnoni’s regular tentmate, a thirty-one-year-old guide from Courmayeur. They were supposed to set out from Camp VIII, establish a camp high on the Shoulder, then go for the summit the next day. They would be supported by their other teammates, who would ferry loads up to Camp IX.

  But after he started out on July 28, Rey gained only about 160 feet before dumping his load and turning back. According to Lacedelli, “Two of us actually had to help him back to the tent because he could hardly stand up.” Stricken by some kind of altitude sickness, Rey gave up all hopes of the summit and headed down the mountain.

  Thus, almost by accident, Lacedelli took Rey’s place in the summit party. Lacedelli had never gotten along with Desio, who had relegated him to the “B team”—the “second group,” which also included Bonatti and whose duty was mainly to carry loads in support of the five climbers in the “first group.” A twenty-nine-year-old guide from Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites, Lacedelli was treated almost with contempt by Desio, as if he were a country bumpkin lucky to be invited on the expedition.

  On July 26, at Camp VII, Bonatti had suffered from food poisoning—he thought he might have eaten spoiled sardines—and was so ill that he had had to stay in camp while his teammates pushed on to Camp VIII. Furious with himself and deeply depressed, Bonatti decided to force his way back into the action. He would recall in 1961, “I decided to eat at all costs, though the very thought made me feel sick; only in this way, I thought, would I be able to regain a little of my lost strength and resume my place up there.” By July 29, he was almost back to his normal self. And, as it would turn out, Bonatti was fitter and stronger than anyone else on the mountain.

  On July 30, Compagnoni and Lacedelli pushed up to the Shoulder, traversed it, and set up a Camp IX at 26,250 feet. Their choice of a campsite was a curious one: instead of pitching their tent on the broad, almost level ridge of the Shoulder, they angled left and stopped at a narrow shelf hidden among the rocks at the base of the summit pyramid, very near where Fritz Wiessner had started climbing the final band on his first attempt, in 1939.

  It was only after more than fifty years of silence that Lacedelli cast new light on the decision about where to pitch Camp IX. In 2006, he wrote,

  Compagnoni and I reached the place we had all agreed on for Camp IX. I said to Compagnoni, “Shall we pitch the tent?” but Compagnoni said, “No, here is no good, it’s too dangerous.” He then suggested we cross over to the left. I said, “Isn’t it more dangerous that way?” But he wouldn’t listen and so we carried On…. Eventually we reached a place that wasn’t particularly good … it was precarious with a bit of a slope.

  A camp at the base of the rock band would have made sense only if the two men planned to attack the cliffs above, as Wiessner had. But Lacedelli and Compagnoni intended to climb the Bottleneck couloir the next morning. On Wiessner’s second attempt, he had had to lead the dangerous traverse across the lower edge of the rock band just to get to the foot of the Bottleneck.

  The true reason for Compagnoni’s insistence on the out-of-the-way location for Camp IX would not become clear until more than half a century after the expedition.

  After pitching their tent on the “precarious” slope among the rocks, Lacedelli and Compagnoni were poised to make the summit attempt on July 31. But they were convinced they had no chance to get to the top without supplemental oxygen. Unable to carry heavy oxygen bottles to Camp IX along with their tent, stove, sleeping bags, and food, they counted on their teammates at Camp VIII to ferry up the critical cylinders.

  Only there were two problems. The oxygen bottles that Lacedelli and Compagnoni needed were not at Camp VIII but down at Camp VII, at only 24,700 feet. And one by one, the other Italians up high
who ought to have been able to ferry loads had succumbed to lethargy or altitude sickness. By July 30, only two men were capable of supporting the summit duo. They were Walter Bonatti and the Hunza Amir Mahdi.

  In a heroic effort, on July 30 Bonatti recruited Mahdi to perform the ultimate load carry. That day the two men descended to Camp VII, picked up two racked sets of oxygen bottles (loads weighing almost forty pounds per man), carried them back up to Camp VIII, and then, with only a short rest, pushed up onto the Shoulder toward Camp IX.

  It was dusk before an exhausted Bonatti and Mahdi reached the point on the Shoulder, at 26,000 feet, where the team had agreed to pitch Camp IX. But there was no tent in sight. Deeply alarmed, Bonatti cried out, “Lino! Achille! Where are you?” He scanned the frozen slope above him, as darkness began to engulf the mountain. The only answer was silence.

  Bonatti guessed that his teammates must be less than 600 feet away, somewhere in the scattered rocks. The traverse to reach those rocks, however, would be perilous in the extreme, and it was now almost pitchdark. Bonatti’s headlamp had ceased to work, and Mahdi had no lamp of his own.

  Abruptly, a light pierced the gloom, to the left and slightly above the climbers. At Camp IX, one of the summit duo must at last have heard Bonatti’s cries and turned on his own headlamp to show the way. But now Bonatti heard Lacedelli call out, “Have you got the oxygen?”

  “Yes!”

  “Good! Leave it there and go straight down!”

  What could Lacedelli mean? Was he simply unwilling to share his small tent with the two teammates who had worked so hard to support the summit bid? “I can’t!” Bonatti protested. “Mahdi can’t make it!”

  The beam of light promised safety only a few hundred feet away. Crazed by exhaustion, Mahdi started scrabbling, out of control, across the dangerous slope toward Camp IX. Bonatti shouted at his partner to stop, but the language barrier now worked its sinister confusion. (Mahdi spoke only Urdu, Bonatti only Italian, with a mere handful of English words their common vocabulary.) “Mahdi! Turn back! No good!” yelled Bonatti, to no avail.

  Abruptly the beam of light switched off. Once again, only silence came from above. A panicked Mahdi yelled in English, “No good, Compagnoni Sahib! No good, Lacedelli Sahib!”

  At last Bonatti managed to coax the Hunza back to the precarious stance he had kicked in the slope. For another half hour, Bonatti screamed his own curses into the night. “No, I don’t want to die!” he wailed. “Lino! Achille! Help us, damn you!” Not a word came from Camp IX.

  Finally, in a fog of rage and despair, Bonatti turned to the slope before him and began to hack out a ledge with his ice ax. The two men had neither tent nor sleeping bag. Never before had anyone attempted, let alone survived, a bivouac in the open at such an altitude.

  “I could have gone down in the dark by myself, even without a headlamp,” Bonatti recalled in 2003. “But Mahdi was out of his mind. Several times I had to keep him from running away. Mahdi was like an unchained force of nature. Even in the night, he was yelling crazily. I had to find a way to calm him down just with the tone of my voice. I tried to invent my own English—convincing sounds, more than words. ‘Good, Mahdi, good,’ I said over and over. ‘No! No!’ he answered. That was his only word.

  “It took a long time to dig a ledge out of the icy slope. We sat very close together. Mahdi was too tired to take his crampons off, so I did it for him. Otherwise his frostbite would have been even worse.

  “I spent the whole night looking at my five fingers to see if they were still there. Making up problems in my head to see if I still think right. I kept banging my legs with my ice ax—that was before we knew it was a bad thing to do. It was as if one breath lasted the whole night.”

  In the wee hours, a sudden snow squall descended on the mountain. Bonatti and Mahdi were smothered in blowing snow. Three times Bonatti had to dig himself and Mahdi out.

  As soon as first light arrived, Mahdi took off, almost running down the mountain toward Camp VIII. “In the morning,” Bonatti remembered, “I was a piece of ice. I didn’t have the strength to restrain him. All I could do was put on his crampons. My heart was beating fast as I watched him go. Then he reached a flat area, and I knew he was okay.” Bonatti cached the oxygen gear in the snow, then gathered himself and slowly climbed down to Camp VIII.

  It’s a tribute to Bonatti’s coolheadedness that both men survived that night. Other climbers, including Hornbein and Unsoeld on Everest, would later get through even higher bivouacs in one piece (though Unsoeld lost his toes to frostbite), but in 1954, most climbers would have said that to attempt to survive a night without shelter at 26,000 feet was to invite certain death. And just as I admire Wiessner for not abandoning Pasang Lama in 1939, I admire Bonatti, who could have saved his own skin by going down to Camp VIII in the dark, for not abandoning Mahdi.

  At first light on July 31, Compagnoni and Lacedelli prepared for their summit push. In Desio’s Ascent of K2, the short chapter covering the events of July 30 and 31 bears the footnote “As described by Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli.” The narrative veers awkwardly between the first and the third person. Sometimes it is “we” who act, sometimes “Compagnoni” or “Lacedelli.” But even though Desio must have edited the chapter, it remains the principal source for Compagnoni and Lacedelli’s side of this unhappy story—or would remain so until 2006. In a small book he published that year, called K2: The Price of Conquest, Lacedelli insisted that he had nothing to do with the contents of the chapter in Ascent and that it was based entirely on Compagnoni’s diary.

  In that chapter, on July 30 the two men installed at Camp IX see a pair of tiny figures approaching from below, far too late in the afternoon. In the first person, the narrative says, “As dusk was falling we heard shouts. At once we came out of the tent. In the semi-darkness we could not see Bonatti and Mahdi, but we recognized their voices. Unfortunately, the high wind made conversation extremely difficult.” At last Lacedelli thought he understood Bonatti to be yelling that although he “could manage by himself,” Mahdi wanted to return at once to Camp VIII.

  “Go back!” we shouted. “Go back! Leave the masks! Don’t come any farther!” It did not occur to us that our colleague could be thinking of spending the night at such an altitude without a tent or even a sleeping-bag.

  Now Bonatti’s voice was no longer audible. “Obviously,” we thought, “he’s taken our advice and gone down below.”

  The two men in the cramped tent spent a miserable, sleepless night. At first light they emerged to see “an ominous carpet of mist” creeping up from below.

  We searched the snow-covered slope below for the oxygen-masks which Bonatti and Mahdi were supposed to have left there the evening before. Suddenly, to our amazement, we caught sight of a figure receding into the distance. Who was it—Bonatti or Mahdi? … We called out to the man at the top of our voices. He stopped and turned around, but he did not answer, and after a moment he resumed his halting progress down the precipitous slope.

  We were simply flabbergasted…. How could we suspect the truth—namely that two men had survived the rigours of a whole night spent in the open at an altitude of more than 26,000 feet?

  Is this account completely fictitious? It’s true that high wind can make shouted conversations extremely difficult to understand. In 2005, when Veikka Gustafsson and I were camped at 22,000 feet on Annapurna, waiting for the wind to die down so we could go for the summit, our three Italian friends were in a tent only fifty feet away. Especially with the language barrier, shouting to each other over the wind made communication difficult at best. Eventually we resorted to hand signals, like thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

  I suppose it’s possible that Lacedelli and Compagnoni sincerely believed that the two men who had brought up the oxygen had descended in the dark, and only realized in the morning that they must have bivouacked. (Bonatti swears that no one called out to him in the morning.) But the obvious reason for Lacedelli and Compagnoni to have yelled out, �
�Go back!” was that they would have been extremely reluctant to share their cramped two-man tent with the refugees from the arduous load carry.

  In Compagnoni’s account, the two men left their tent at 5:00 A.M. They traversed across the slope, then headed straight down to the site of the cache Bonatti and Mahdi had left. He reported, “Having reached our objective, we hoisted the crates each containing three cylinders onto our backs.” This is a key passage, for in it Compagnoni acknowledges that heavy oxygen bottles were the cargo Bonatti and Mahdi had hauled up to 26,000 feet. Yet in the dialogue quoted above, the men demand “Leave the masks!” Why masks, not bottles? A possible reason for this strange locution would not emerge until many years after the expedition.

  By now, the mist had risen and the first snowflakes had started to fall. It sounds like a situation similar to ours on summit day in 1992. And the two men now uttered words very much like the ones Scott, Charley, and I exchanged. Their dialogue is captured in the summit chapter of Desio’s Ascent of K2. “What do you say?” Lacedelli asked. Compagnoni answered, “I say we ought to have a try.” (It’s of course quite convenient that Compagnoni gives himself the credit for being the more committed climber.)

  At the foot of the Bottleneck, the two men decided the couloir was too dangerous. Fifteen years earlier, insisted Compagnoni, Wiessner had found the ice “clear and firm,” but now “it was covered with such a mass of snow that it would have been madness to climb it.” Madness, one presumes, because it looked ready to avalanche, not because of the hanging ice cliff far above.

  So the two men attacked the very edge of the rock band, several hundred feet left of the Bottleneck. Compagnoni took a short leader fall but was unhurt; Lacedelli led a hundred-foot cliff after taking off both his crampons and his gloves. “Here, in fact,” Compagnoni writes, “we found that our resources were already taxed to the limit.”