K2

by Ed Viesturs

  Hours passed by. The men slowly solved the edge of the rock band, then the ramp leading left to the summit snowfield. In one place, the snow was so deep, it took Compagnoni an hour to gain 50 vertical feet. Then: “Suddenly, at intervals of a few seconds, we both experienced a horrible sensation. We found ourselves gasping for breath.” The two men had used up their bottled oxygen.

  This event would prove to be a critical pivot point in the controversy that would, for half a century, hang over the first ascent. Strangely enough, rather than dump the useless bottles, the men kept the “crates” on their backs. Realizing that this would make little sense to other climbers, Compagnoni offers a four-point explanation. The key claims are two: that the pair wanted to leave something on the summit to prove their ascent, and that “in order to discard the crates we should have had to throw ourselves flat on the snow, which was very deep and unstable.”

  This sounds just plain weird. During the few expeditions on which I’ve used supplemental oxygen—when I was guiding clients on Everest, for instance—I’ve always found that I can barely tolerate the weight even with the oxygen flowing. If I ran out of oxygen, I’d just chuck the thing, because you simply don’t have the strength to carry useless bottles. In 1991 on Everest, when a faulty valve screwed up my oxygen rig, I simply shrugged off my pack and left the thing sitting in the snow. It’s hard to imagine that Lacedelli and Compagnoni couldn’t ditch those heavy bottles with a similar shrug of the shoulders.

  The men plugged on. All the way up, Compagnoni insists, the men took not a single sip of water. He adds, “We had feared that the lack of oxygen would result in a loss of energy, but this was not so.” That claim, too, doesn’t quite ring true. When you’re breathing gas for hours and suddenly run out, you crash with a vengeance. Jon Krakauer describes that happening to him on Everest in 1996, as he reached the Hillary Step on his way down from the summit: “My cognitive functions, which had been marginal before, instantly went into a nosedive. I felt like I’d been slipped an overdose of a powerful sedative.”

  At 6:00 P.M., Compagnoni and Lacedelli reached the summit. They embraced each other, tied flags to their ice axes for the summit photos, took a self-timed photo of themselves together—and finally threw off the dead weight of the oxygen crates.

  The descent was a nightmare, as each man fell and slid several times, but fetched up in soft snow. Instead of downclimbing the edge of the rock band, they plunge-stepped straight down the Bottleneck, which did not avalanche. At one point in the night, the men thought they were lost. Their fingers were frostbitten (both would later undergo amputations). Finally they saw a light in the distance—a headlamp or a stove inside one of the tents at Camp VIII. The ordeal was over. According to their account in Desio’s book: “Arms were flung around our waists, questions were fired at us, hands were clapped on our shoulders. Abram, Bonatti and Gallotti literally jumped for joy, and the two Hunzas, Mahdi and Isakhan, seemed hardly less delighted.”

  K2 had been climbed.

  Bonatti corroborates that joyous reunion. He wrote in 1961, in Le Mie Montagne, “At 11 P.M., five hearts were exulting over the same victory in the same tent…. At that moment, and only for that moment, I forced myself to forget all other reality.”

  Only for that moment…. Bonatti recalled in 2003, “I kept waiting for Lacedelli or Compagnoni to apologize. At Camp VIII, there was no ‘Bravo, Walter.’ Not a word of thanks, never. In base camp, I waited to hear excuses. I was conscious of what I had suffered, but I was young and ingenuous. The true of story of K2—the really bad story—begins after the expedition.”

  Amazingly, Bonatti had escaped from the bivouac unscathed. It was Mahdi who turned out to be the true martyr of K2, eventually suffering the amputation of nearly all his toes and fingers. The finest Hunza climber of his day, Mahdi had, just the year before, helped carry the badly frostbitten Hermann Buhl down Nanga Parbat. After K2, reduced to a virtual cripple, Mahdi would never again go into the high mountains.

  In Ascent of K2, Desio makes no acknowledgment of Mahdi’s sacrifice. The closest he comes to mentioning the man’s terrible frostbite is in a single comment about the effort of the team to get down the mountain: “The Hunzas, however, postponed their departure from Camp V until they had administered first aid to Mahdi. As a result, the return of the climbing party was delayed for a whole day.”

  Back in Italy, the triumph on K2 made a titanic splash. Compagnoni and Lacedelli were instantly enshrined in the pantheon of their country’s demigods of adventure. For decades, they remained Italy’s most famous mountaineers. And in 2004, as the country engaged in a year-long celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of its greatest mountaineering achievement, Compagnoni and Lacedelli, then ninety and seventy-nine years old, were feted again as national heroes.

  Bonatti, however, was lastingly embittered by the expedition. In 1961, he published Le Mie Montagne, a memoir of his finest climbs. There he revealed how Desio’s expedition had changed his very character: “Until the conquest of K2 I had always felt a great affinity for and trust of other men, but after what happened in 1954 I came to mistrust people. I tended to rely only on myself.”

  The publication of Bonatti’s version of what happened on July 30 and 31 caused quite a stir in Italy. Rather than the innocent miscommunication at dusk that Compagnoni’s account had described, Bonatti made it clear that he thought his two teammates had hung him and Mahdi out to dry. “They didn’t want to know if we were in the bivouac,” he bitterly mused in 2003. “I was supposed to die. That would make the expedition even more glorious.”

  By the time I read On the Heights, the English translation of Le Mie Montagne, I was twenty-two years old. Bonatti was already a hero of mine, because his epic adventures—the terrible retreat from the Frêney Pillar on Mont Blanc, the amazing solo on the Petit Dru, and, of course, K2—were legendary. But after reading his own gripping accounts of these climbs, I saw him as even more of a supernatural character. He was obviously one of the most phenomenally gifted climbers of all time. Yet I never realized until recently just how bitter and prolonged the controversy in the aftermath of K2 had been.

  In 1961, Le Mie Montagne had sent fireworks into the mountaineering sky above Italy. But the bombshell came in 1964, in the form of a pair of articles by a climbing journalist named Nino Giglio that appeared in the Gazzetta del Popolo, a widely read magazine. The first article was titled “After Ten Years, the Truth About K2.”

  Giglio claimed that Bonatti had tried to steal the summit from Lacedelli and Compagnoni. To enlist Mahdi in this ruse, he had promised the Hunza the glory of being the first Pakistani to stand atop K2. And the reason Lacedelli and Compagnoni had run out of oxygen short of the summit was that Bonatti had siphoned off at least an hour’s worth of the precious gas as he huddled in his bivouac. In the morning, according to Giglio, Bonatti dashed down to Camp VIII, abandoning Mahdi.

  At these accusations, Bonatti sprang furiously to his own defense. He instigated a libel suit against Giglio, which culminated in a 1966 trial in Turin. Not only the journalist but Compagnoni and two other teammates were called to testify. A deposition from Mahdi, in Pakistan, was conveyed to the court. Under oath, Giglio admitted that Compagnoni was the source of the incendiary charges.

  Bonatti was quick to point out the impossibility of his having siphoned gas from the oxygen bottles, for he’d had no mask or regulator, without which there was no way to transfer the oxygen to his lungs. Lacedelli and Compagnoni had the masks and regulators at Camp IX.

  Thus the curious cry at dusk—”Leave the masks!”—looks like a deliberate falsehood. It seemed to Bonatti that in misrepresenting the shouted conversation in the chapter of Desio’s official book, Compagnoni was already planting the seeds of the claim that Nino Giglio would voice ten years later, that Bonatti had stolen the lead climbers’ oxygen.

  The outcome of the trial was total vindication for Bonatti. Yet the antagonisms indelibly tarnished Bonatti’s reputation, especially in Italy.
As he told an American writer in 2003, “It’s stupid, but the whole world believed Desio and Compagnoni. Because it’s a rhetorical formula that climbers always tell the truth.”

  If his K2 experience bred a lasting sense of mistrust of others, Bonatti was still determined to get some kind of revenge for his mistreatment by Lacedelli and Compagnoni. That revenge took the form of solo climbing, at a level of daring that was decades ahead of his time. In August 1955, Bonatti tackled the southwest face of the Petit Dru, above Chamonix.

  Virtually no routes anywhere in the world that were, for their time, at the edge of the impossible had ever been attempted solo. Bonatti’s six-day ascent of the pillar that would be named for him nearly cost him his life. But it was so visionary an achievement that the great British Himalayan climber Doug Scott later hailed it as “probably the most important single climbing feat ever to take place in mountaineering.”

  There followed, during the next decade, other visionary ascents: Gasherbrum IV in 1958, by far the hardest climb yet done in the Himalaya or the Karakoram. The north face of the Grandes Jorasses in winter, in 1963. And then, in 1965, on the one hundredth anniversary of its first ascent, a new route direttissima, solo, in winter, on the north face of the Matterhorn.

  The last achievement was Bonatti’s swan song. At the age of thirty-five, he quit serious climbing overnight. (Virtually no other top mountaineer has ever ended his career in such a fashion.) He turned instead to other fields of adventure—deserts, rivers, jungles—as he reported for the magazine Época, often on daring solo expeditions.

  The boldest of all Bonatti’s projects, during his miraculous decade, was one that never happened. After the Dru, he recalled in 2003, “I was in a state of grace. I felt so strong that I thought I could do anything. And the name for ‘anything’ was K2.”

  For the summer of 1956, Bonatti plotted an attempt to climb K2 solo, without oxygen. “I planned it all very precisely,” he said. “I would take four to six porters to base camp on the Baltoro Glacier. I had studied the route. Our fixed ropes were still there. I would carry only 25 kilos [55 pounds]. I could be self-sufficient for a week. And I knew that if I could survive a night in the open at 8,100 meters without oxygen, I could go to the summit without oxygen.”

  In the end, Bonatti failed to attract any sponsors who could have given him a shot at K2 solo, and he was far too poor to pay his own way. It is hard to appreciate today just how far ahead of its time Bonatti’s scheme was. A comparable feat would not be performed for another twenty-four years, when Reinhold Messner climbed Everest solo, without oxygen, in 1980. I can relate to Bonatti’s impulse: my own frustration with the lack of cohesion and teamwork on K2 in 1992 drove me to a solo attempt on Everest the next year.

  Meanwhile, however, Bonatti could not put K2 behind him. In the end, he would write three books about his K2 experience, reprinting document after legal document as he sought vindication not only in the courts but in the eyes of the public.

  Bonatti had always been convinced that Lacedelli and Compagnoni had placed their Camp IX out of sight—among the scattered rocks at the foot of the summit pyramid, above a dangerous traverse—in order to keep him and Mahdi from joining them in the cramped tent, and perhaps going to the summit with them the next day. After their heroic load carry on July 30, however, both men would have been too exhausted to try for the top the next day. But a shared tent could have saved their lives, and certainly would have prevented the frostbite that left Mahdi permanently maimed.

  Vindication in this respect finally came in 2006, with Lacedelli’s K2: The Price of Conquest. There the Cortina guide confessed to the very ruse Bonatti had long suspected. In Lacedelli’s telling, the whole thing was Compagnoni’s idea:

  I only understood later…. I believe he didn’t want Bonatti to reach us. When I saw Bonatti come towards us I asked Compagnoni why he didn’t want him to reach us and he said that it was just the two of us that had to make the final climb to the summit.

  Lacedelli also confirmed that he and his partner had the crucial masks and regulators in their tent, and thus that the accusation that Bonatti had siphoned off oxygen was spurious.

  Bonatti also never believed that Lacedelli and Compagnoni had used up their bottled oxygen and gone on to the summit without its aid. That was a myth, he believed, intended to make the summit push more dramatic. And after the 1964 accusations came out, Bonatti realized how the tale of running out of oxygen fed into the imputation that he had siphoned off gas during his bivouac, leaving less than enough for the summit duo.

  In K2: The Price of Conquest, however, Lacedelli still insists that he and Compagnoni ran out of oxygen on the way up but carried the useless bottles all the way to the summit. By 2006, however, Bonatti had a new ally, in the curious form of an Australian surgeon and armchair climber named Robert Marshall, who had become fascinated by the controversy. Marshall taught himself Italian just so he could become a close student of the episode, met Bonatti, and eventually put together the definitive casebook of Bonatti’s side of the story, published in the United States in 2001 in Bonatti’s valedictory work, The Mountains of My Life.

  Marshall contributed several key new insights to the muddled affair. Analyzing the rate of climb of the summit pair, and taking at face value their claim to have started upward on July 31 at 6:15 in the morning, he calculated that through nine and a half hours of climbing with gas, Lacedelli and Compagnoni would have averaged 168 vertical feet per hour. Then, from 26,700 feet to the summit, suddenly bereft of oxygen but carrying the weight of the useless bottles, they miraculously increased their pace to 320 feet per hour. This goes against everything other climbers have reported about progress at such altitudes with and without supplementary oxygen—just as it goes against my own experience. The higher you go, especially without supplemental oxygen, the slower you go. There’s simply not enough oxygen to feed your muscles, so each step becomes more difficult than the previous one.

  Even more damningly, Marshall stumbled upon a pair of summit photos published in 1955 in the Swiss anthology The Mountain World, although not in Ascent of K2. One shows Compagnoni with his oxygen mask still on his face. The other is of Lacedelli, maskless, but with exactly the sort of ring of congealed ice on his mustache and beard that would have formed around a mask he had just removed. This discovery demonstrated almost beyond a doubt that the story of running out of oxygen was a lie.

  In 2003, an American writer questioned Lacedelli about these discrepancies. “We were using German-made Dräger bottles,” the Cortina guide answered. “We didn’t know how to regulate them properly. We had too much oxygen—it burned our throats, and we bled from the mouth. That’s why we ran out.” This did not speak to Marshall’s point about the faster pace the two men would have had to manage after running out of oxygen.

  Lacedelli also offered a new explanation for why they didn’t chuck the apparatus to lighten their loads: “I couldn’t take the bottles off because my fingers were frozen.” I don’t buy that reasoning, either. It’s the simplest thing in the world to take off the oxygen crate.

  Asked about the seemingly incriminating summit photos published in The Mountain World, Lacedelli answered, “Compagnoni put his mask on for just five minutes, to warm his breathing. I just put up my hand. I didn’t want cold air in my throat.” That, too, doesn’t make sense. If you put a mask on your face when you’re not getting oxygen through it, it’s like breathing into a plastic bag. If you did it for five minutes, you’d probably pass out.

  The American writer further probed Lacedelli about the strange cry at dusk, “Leave the masks!” In the original Italian edition of Desio’s book, the key phrase is “Lascia i respiratori!” Strictly speaking, “respirator” refers to the whole apparatus, gas mask and regulator included. Had Lacedelli meant the bottles alone, he would have cried, “Lascia le bombole!”

  “What did you say when you called out to Bonatti at dusk?” the writer asked.

  “Lascia le bombole!” Lacedelli answ
ered guilessly. “Leave the bottles! Go down to Camp VIII!”

  “Lascia i respiratori!,” then, must have been Compagnoni’s deliberate lie in 1954, as he was already planting the charge he would make through Nino Giglio ten years later, accusing Bonatti of siphoning off the precious gas in his bivouac.

  At his worst, Ardito Desio emerges from the story of K2 in 1954 as a pompous dictator, a self-important and somewhat mad scientist, even a semicomic figure. If there’s a villain in the story, I’m afraid it would have to be Achille Compagnoni.

  At the end of his interview with the American writer in 2003, Lacedelli sounded a wistful note. “For a long time after the expedition,” he said, “I was friendly with Bonatti. Then we stopped writing and telephoning. I haven’t seen him in 25 years.”

  Lacedelli sighed. “This was not war. Millions of people fight wars, and then shake hands afterwards. I hope one day to shake hands with Bonatti.”

  When all is said and done, what lingers about the first ascent of K2 is the feeling of just how sad a story it is. What should have been a great collective triumph ended up in backstabbing and endless controversy. The British team on Everest the year before had made its first ascent as a harmonious team. Decades later, the members of that expedition were still getting together in North Wales for reunions where they did a little climbing and a lot of nostalgic reminiscing.

  Needless to say, the Italian K2 team never had a reunion. Instead, some of its members ended up suing each other. (Desio even went so far as to sue his own cinematographer, Marió Fantin, claiming that he’d withheld several reels of 16-millimeter film.) And in January 1955, all the team members except Compagnoni and one other climber signed a letter of protest against Desio’s book, claiming it was full of distortions and outright lies. The first ascent of K2 may have been embraced by the Italian public as a great national triumph, but for the climbers, the victory was bittersweet at best.