K2

by Ed Viesturs

  Back in the States, Bob Bates and Charlie Houston learned of the Italian triumph on K2. Bates took the news philosophically. But for Houston, the ascent was deeply disturbing. He had already been granted a permit for a 1955 expedition, and, as he later recalled, “I thought that the third time we must succeed.”

  Within a day after learning of the Italian success, Houston (in the words of his biographer Bernadette McDonald) “wandered into the local hospital in Nashua, forty miles from [his home in] Exeter, with no idea of who or where he was and with absolutely no identification on him.” Diagnosed with global amnesia, Houston was admitted to a hospital. A psychiatrist friend who visited him found him “weeping inconsolably,” with his short-term memory gone. The shock of the news about K2’s first ascent had apparently sent Houston over the edge.

  He was soon restored to his wife and home, but it took him several weeks to recover. That autumn, Charlie Houston quit climbing for good.

  7

  THE DANGEROUS SUMMER

  The second ascent of Mount Everest came in 1956, only three years after Hillary and Tenzing, when a Swiss party climbed the highest peak in the world and made the first ascent of neighboring Lhotse, the fourth-highest. The second ascent of K2 came only in 1977, twenty-three years after Lacedelli and Compagnoni. If anything, that second ascent represented logistical overkill far exceeding even Desio’s 1954 extravaganza. The team of Japanese in 1977 had no fewer than fifty-three members and 1,500 porters! The climbers ascended via the Abruzzi Ridge and, like the Italians, used bottled oxygen up high. In early August, seven members reached the summit. One positive note was that for the first time a native Pakistani, the Hunza Ashraf Aman, also topped out.

  The Japanese expedition, however, was viewed by mountaineers around the world as a throwback. Jim Curran writes in K2: The Story of the Savage Mountain,

  This, then, was the long-awaited second ascent of K2: a total anticlimax.

  If it proved anything it was that with enough money and manpower success was almost guaranteed…. Even in 1977, the expedition was seen as a dinosaur, totally out of step with the current thinking epitomised by Messner and Habeler two years earlier [on their landmark alpine-style ascent of Gasherbrum I by a new route].

  The allure of Everest diminished almost not at all after its first ascent. Between 1954 and 1975, no fewer than seventeen expeditions attacked the mountain, their nationalities ranging from Indian to Argentine to Spanish to American to Japanese to Chinese. During that same twenty-two-year period, not a single major expedition ventured onto K2.

  The main reason for that neglect was that, thanks to political turmoil, Pakistan closed the Karakoram to climbing from 1961 through 1974. But the intrinsic difficulty of the mountain also loomed as a prohibitive factor.

  With the reopening of the Karakoram, Americans renewed their pursuit of K2, sending powerful parties in 1975 and 1978. The first attempt, which tackled the complex northwest ridge, was thwarted by route-finding problems and hideous internal dissension. It was this expedition that Galen Rowell chronicled in his tell-all book In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods. The 1978 team was likewise torn with dissension, but finally placed four Americans on top. Jim Wickwire, John Roskelley, Lou Reichardt, and Rick Ridgeway—superb mountaineers, all four—made the third ascent of K2 via the long and intricate northeast ridge, which had been attempted before but never completed. (For the top 2,000 feet, the Americans’ route coincided with the Abruzzi route.) Three of the four reached the summit without supplementary oxygen.

  Though they’re a bit older than I am, Wickwire and Roskelley became good friends of mine. Both of them were on the 1989 Kangchenjunga expedition with me, although they left the team early without reaching the summit—Jim because he developed a bad case of pneumonia, John essentially because he got fed up with the way the expedition was being run. Ridgeway’s memoir about the 1978 expedition, The Last Step, also a tell-all inside account, was one of the books I devoured before I went to K2 in 1992. The sordid details of the team’s interpersonal conflicts that Ridgeway captured are not the sort of thing I’d commit to print myself, but I found them fascinating all the same.

  During the first years after the embargo ended, Pakistan limited the expeditions on K2 to one a year. The Ministry of Tourism, however, couldn’t help noticing what the Nepalese were doing with Everest, granting permits to multiple expeditions within a single year. Since that’s such an obvious moneymaker for the government, it’s a wonder the Pakistanis didn’t start the practice sooner.

  By the early 1980s, K2 was “hot” in mountaineering circles. Four expeditions focused on the mountain in 1982, four again the following year, and four in 1985. In 1986, Pakistan at last opened the floodgates. That year, no fewer than eleven separate parties would congregate on the slopes of K2.

  Meanwhile, in the years from 1978 through 1985, the mountain witnessed six more fatalities. There was Nick Estcourt from the British team in 1978, buried by an avalanche. The next year, two Pakistanis died, one of a heart attack, one by falling into a crevasse. In 1982, a Pole also died of a heart attack, and a Japanese climber fell on the descent after reaching the summit by a new route, the north ridge. And in 1985, a Frenchman died on the descent of the Abruzzi Ridge.

  By the end of 1985, then, thirty-nine men (but no women) had reached the summit of K2, while twelve had died trying. With the summer of 1986, that ratio would become much worse.

  There were two American teams on K2 that year. One of the ironies in my life that I’ll never stop thinking about is that I was invited on one of those two expeditions, before I’d ever been anywhere in the Himalaya or the Karakoram. In 1986 I was twenty-six years old, in my fourth year of guiding during summers at Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. (RMI), but during the school year I was getting my doctorate in veterinary medicine at Washington State University. One of my RMI colleagues was a guy named John Smolich who’d been to Everest in 1984. John was a phenomenally strong climber, but he came across as soft-spoken and gentle. I really respected him.

  John was the leader of an eight-man team from the Pacific Northwest. They were superambitious: instead of the classic Abruzzi Ridge, they were aiming at the beautiful, unclimbed route on the south face that Reinhold Messner had called the “Magic Line.” Sometime that winter, John invited me to join the team. Andy Politz, another RMI guide, was also on board. He was an even closer buddy, the guy I’d bailed off Rainier with in a winter storm, when I survived the only unplanned bivouac of my life. Andy and I had also invented our “load wars”—an ongoing competition to see who could carry the most groceries to Camp Muir while guiding clients. And in 1983, Andy and I had served as junior guides under Phil Ershler on an RMI-led ascent of Denali—my first expedition ever.

  I was deeply flattered to be invited to K2, and sorely tempted. There was no way, however, that I could skip out of my summer externship at Washington State. With great regret, I turned down the invitation.

  The Americans had been at base camp for only three weeks when, on June 21, Smolich and teammate Alan Pennington started up the approach gully at the base of the Magic Line. Almost immediately, at 5:30 in the morning, they heard a loud roar. Morning sun striking the face had dislodged a huge boulder thousands of feet above. (That boulder had been considered so stable that on a previous foray up to Camp II, some of the team members had anchored a fixed rope to it.) The boulder started careening down the route. When it hit the top of the approach gully, it triggered a 15-foot fracture line that set loose a massive avalanche. Smolich and Pennington tried to run for it, but they didn’t have a chance, and they were engulfed in tons of snow and ice debris.

  Their teammates dug out Pennington, but it was too late to save his life. John’s body was never found. After burying Pennington near the Gilkey-Puchoz memorial, the rest of the team abandoned the expedition and headed home.

  John was the first guy I’d known personally who’d died in the Himalaya. (I didn’t know Alan Pennington.) Later I dug out pictures of the r
oute and tried to figure out if I could learn anything from the catastrophe. But in the end, I had to admit that the death of the two climbers was the result of sheer bad luck. If ever there was a pure case of what we climbers call “objective danger,” it was that freak avalanche triggered by the boulder.

  It’s true that on big mountains, the very lowest slopes can be among the most dangerous. In 1999 on Shishapangma, Alex Lowe, considered by many to be the best climber in the world, was killed with his partner Dave Bridges in a very similar accident, as they strolled out to reconnoiter a route they eventually hoped not only to climb but to ski down. An avalanche broke off thousands of feet above them. Lowe and Bridges tried to run for it, but were smothered by the debris. Their bodies, like Smolich’s, were never found.

  But what can you learn from such grim accidents? If you want to climb an 8,000er, sooner or later you’re going to be kicking steps up an approach gully that just might avalanche.

  Smolich and Pennington happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened to me.

  None of the other ten teams on K2 in 1986 even considered giving up their attempts after the disaster on the Magic Line. But climbers who didn’t know the two victims gathered from many different parties to attend the impromptu funeral service on the glacier for Smolich and Pennington, and they were moved by it. John Barry, one of the best climbers on a British team attempting the unclimbed northwest ridge, later described the service in K2: Savage Mountain, Savage Summer. After Pennington’s body was lowered into a natural “sarcophagus,” Barry wrote,

  An American made a dignified little speech rounding off with a Mallory quotation to the effect that we eat and make money to live—not the other way around. It was a quotation equal to the occasion. A second American, Chelsea, their Base Camp Manager, said something plain, sensible and suitable too. Everyone was holding up well. Then their doctor spoke. He got three words into his bit and broke down, and brought a few others down with him too. But it was a fine funeral, if a funeral can be fine, and K2 is as good a headstone as any parish slate.

  Among the scores of climbers on different teams trying K2 in 1986, you could have assembled an international all-star cast. The Pole Jerzy Kukuczka was locked in a battle with Reinhold Messner to become the first man to reach the summit of all fourteen 8,000ers. K2 would be his eleventh such success, putting him only one peak behind Messner. The great Tyrolean mountaineer, however, aced out Kukuczka by knocking off his last two, Makalu and Lhotse, in the autumn of 1986.

  It was hardly a match waged on a level playing field. By 1986, Messner was the most famous climber in Europe, perhaps in the world. He had multiple sponsors, received large fees for speaking engagements, and earned royalties from a string of books he’d written. Messner is without question one of the greatest high-altitude climbers of all time, as he demonstrated with breakthrough ascents on Everest in 1978 with Peter Habeler, without supplemental oxygen, and again on Everest solo and oxygenless two years later. But in the highly competitive circles of Himalayan aficionados, many observers pointed out that Messner usually chose the standard routes on the 8,000ers.

  Kukuczka, like most Polish climbers, could barely afford each expedition he went on. But what was most admirable about his campaign on the 8,000ers—in 1987, he became the second person to claim all fourteen—was that he almost never opted for the easiest route. Ten of his ascents of the highest peaks were by new routes, and four came in winter—including the first winter ascent of Annapurna, an achievement that still awes me, twenty-two years later. Sadly, Kukuczka died near the top of the unclimbed south face of Lhotse in 1989, when a rope broke. It’s a dreary testament to this great mountaineer’s continued poverty that the rope was a cheap six-millimeter cord he had picked up in a market in Kathmandu.

  In 1986, Kukuczka was determined to climb a new route up the center of K2’s south face. And he intended to pull off this deed alpine-style, with but a single fellow Pole as his partner.

  Clear on the other side of K2, climbing out of China rather than Pakistan, a very strong American team was attempting the north ridge. Its members also included several superstars, among them Alex Lowe, George Lowe (no relation to Alex), Dave Cheesmond, and Catherine Freer, considered the best American woman alpinist of her day. Despite having such experts along, the team had to turn back a little above 26,500 feet, defeated by storms and terrible snow conditions. As mentioned above, Alex Lowe would die on Shishapangma thirteen years later. And Cheesmond and Freer vanished in 1987, on an incredibly bold two-person alpine-style attempt on the Hummingbird Ridge of Mount Logan, in Canada. Speculation had it that their tent, pitched on a narrow curl of the relentlessly steep and twisting ridge, broke loose with a cornice that collapsed, sending them hurtling to the glacier thousands of feet below. Their bodies, like Lowe’s, were never found.

  Another all-star on the mountain in 1986 was the Frenchman Benoît Chamoux. His project was to climb the Abruzzi faster than anyone ever had before. If you wonder just how dangerous trying to climb all the 8,000ers really is, you should contemplate the fates of Kukuczka and Chamoux. In 1995, the Frenchman would disappear near the summit of Kangchenjunga, which would have been his fourteenth and last 8,000er. The scuttlebutt had it that Chamoux wanted Kangchenjunga too badly, as he was running head-to-head with the Swiss mountaineer Erhard Loretan for the honor of being the third man to nail the whole list.

  Yet another climbing celebrity was the Italian Renato Casarotto. His K2 plans were probably the most ambitious of anybody’s that summer. The Magic Line on the south face had repulsed a number of previous attempts. Casarotto wanted to make its first ascent solo.

  At age fifty-four, the Austrian Kurt Diemberger was well past his prime, but by 1986 he was a mountaineering legend. Way back in 1957, he had paired with Hermann Buhl (the man who had made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat solo four years earlier) and two other Austrians to become the first climbers to reach the top of Broad Peak, the twelfth-highest mountain in the world. Theirs was an admirably lightweight assault, accomplished virtually alpine-style, that set a new standard among the 8,000ers. Only eighteen days after summitting on Broad Peak, however, as Diemberger and Buhl retreated from nearby Chogolisa in a gathering storm, a cornice broke loose, taking Buhl to his death. (Like those of so many victims in the Himalaya and the Karakoram, Buhl’s body has never been found.)

  In 1960, Diemberger was a member of a combined Swiss-Austrian team that made the first ascent of Dhaulagiri, the world’s seventh-highest peak. He and Buhl remain eternally the only two climbers to make the first ascents of two different 8,000ers. In 1986, Diemberger joined a large team on K2 to serve chiefly as a filmmaker, but he wanted very much to reach the summit with the woman who had become his regular climbing partner, Julie Tullis from Great Britain.

  The strong British team attempting the northwest ridge was led by Alan Rouse, among the elite of his country’s high-altitude mountaineers. That party had an additional incentive, for any members who got to the top would be the first Britishers to succeed on K2.

  In 1975, the Japanese Junko Tabei had become the first woman to climb Mount Everest. By 1986, no woman had yet reached the top of K2. A number of women had tried, including the Americans Dianne Roberts, Cherie Bech, and Diana Jagersky in 1978. But no woman had yet even come close to summitting. (According to Rick Ridgeway’s The Last Step, much of the dissension among the 1978 team sprang from the conviction among some of the climbers—notably the blunt, outspoken John Roskelley—that Roberts had no business on the mountain, but was along simply because she was the wife of expedition leader Jim Whittaker.)

  Two women on K2 in 1986 seemed capable of making the first female ascent. One was Liliane Barrard from France, who had previously climbed Gasherbrum II and Nanga Parbat. The other was the Pole Wanda Rutkiewicz, widely regarded today as the finest high-altitude female climber of all time. Unable to afford an expedition of her own, Rutkiewicz joined Barrard’s team, launching a friendly rivalry over which w
oman would get to the summit first.

  By 1992, Rutkiewicz had summitted on eight of the fourteen 8,000ers. Many in the climbing world assumed that she would eventually join the ranks of the very few men who had bagged all fourteen. But that May—how often the paths of such ambitious climbers lead to the same dismal outcome!—she disappeared near the summit of Kangchenjunga, just as Chamoux would three years later.

  Many of the climbers involved in the “dangerous summer” of 1986 would later write about it, but only one produced a comprehensive narrative of all the confusing events that took place between June and August. Jim Curran had joined Alan Rouse’s northwest ridge expedition primarily as a cinematographer, but also to write a book, should the team succeed. Though not at the top level as a mountaineer, and with no ambitions to reach the summit, Curran was (and is) one of Britain’s finest mountaineering writers. In the end, instead of writing only about his own expedition, Curran attempted to cover the stories of all eleven teams on the mountain, in his deft 1987 chronicle K2: Triumph and Tragedy.

  By the time the avalanche snuffed out the lives of Smolich and Pennington, Liliane Barrard’s team was high on the Abruzzi Ridge. The foursome was led by Maurice Barrard, Liliane’s husband and inseparable climbing partner. Along with Wanda Rutkiewicz, the party was rounded out by another strong Frenchman, Michel Parmentier.

  Afterward, Rutkiewicz wrote a short account in Polish of her team’s adventure on the Abruzzi. (Translated into English, it is reprinted as an appendix in Curran’s book.) Rutkiewicz’s report is the only insider account of what happened to Barrard’s team.