K2

by Ed Viesturs

  In the spring of 1986 in Paris, Maurice Barrard had met with Kurt Diemberger to discuss the Abruzzi route. In The Endless Knot, Diemberger’s own account of K2, he quotes a statement by Barrard that, in view of what transpired on August 1, 2008, has an eerie prescience:

  “I have serious misgivings about the serac wall on that hanging glacier,” Maurice had confided … pointing to a photograph of the summit pyramid. “It is definitely worse now than it was in 1979. Look at this latest shot: the fracture zone along this great balcony bit looks to have more cracks than ever. Heaven knows how much will come off and funnel down through the Bottleneck.”

  From the start of their climb, Rutkiewicz got along so poorly with Parmentier that she refused to share a tent with him, camping instead in a small two-man tent she borrowed from the British. Trying to climb fast and light through deep, soft snow, the team managed successive gains of only 650 and 1,300 vertical feet on June 21 and 22. Their last camp was at the remarkable altitude of 27,200 feet. Rutkiewicz does not identify the site except to call it “a small rock platform”—my guess is that it was on the ramp after the climb of the Bottleneck and the delicate leftward traverse. Rutkiewicz wrote, “We spent the night there … without sleeping bags in a very bad condition, all four squeezed into one small tent.”

  The climbers had only just over 1,000 vertical feet to climb the next day to reach the summit, but on June 23 they gained ground at a snail’s pace. It may be that they were simply too early in the season, for the snow on the summit cap stayed relentlessly deep and soft. Barrard’s team was the first that year to reach the summit snowfield, so they had had no fixed ropes to rely on above about 24,000 feet, and no one had broken trail ahead of them.

  The four climbers left their squalid camp at 7:30 A.M. on June 23. Halfway to the summit, however, Maurice Barrard made what seemed to Rutkiewicz a very strange announcement: “Now we will rest here for a couple of hours and cook something.” Out of his pack he pulled a stove, a pot, and packets of instant soup.

  That was indeed a bizarre decision. On summit day on an 8,000er, every minute counts. For liquid, you need to sip from a water bottle you’ve filled that morning or the night before, which you carry in a chest pocket to keep the fluid from freezing. I can’t imagine sitting down at something like 27,800 feet on K2 to brew up soup!

  Rutkiewicz felt the same way. “I didn’t want to stay such a long time there drinking soup,” she later wrote. “I was in a hurry. The summit was beckoning. So I left the others and started out on my own.”

  The Pole reached the top at 10:15 A.M., becoming the first woman to climb K2. She wrote a little note, signing it with both her and Liliane’s names, and placed it in a plastic bag tucked into some rocks just below the summit. Given the frictions within the team, it’s surprising that Rutkiewicz didn’t immediately head down. Instead, she waited a long while for her teammates and then, after they arrived, shared an hour’s celebration with them on top.

  The upshot was that the foursome did not regain their 27,200-foot camp until late afternoon. Rutkiewicz was of a mind to keep heading down, but Maurice Barrard urged that they spend the night in the single tent pitched on the rock platform, and she acquiesced. She would later write, “I was tired, but not exhausted. The weather was still good and I was not worried. But I should have been. One should remain at that altitude as short a time as possible. I didn’t know in the sunshine that death was following us down.”

  To try to sleep, Rutkiewicz took two and a half Mogadon tablets. As recently as 1986, climbers routinely popped sleeping pills at high camps, but it was later discovered to be a very dangerous practice. Pills such as Valium and Mogadon continue to depress one’s pulse rate and other aspects of the cardiovascular system for twelve hours or more after waking, which isn’t a good thing for any athlete, much less a mountaineer at 27,000 feet. I never took sleeping pills up high, mainly because I wanted to be fully alert in case a storm blew in during the night or something else went wrong.

  In the morning, Rutkiewicz felt groggy and her balance was off, but she recognized the urgency of getting down the mountain. Parmentier set off first, but both Liliane and Maurice Barrard seemed completely lethargic and moved very slowly. The climb to the summit without supplemental oxygen, sandwiched between two nights spent with four people crammed into a small tent without sleeping bags at 27,200 feet, had taken its physical toll. Soon the gap between the Barrards and their two teammates widened. At Camp III, at 25,250 feet, Rutkiewicz caught up to Parmentier. Several Italians and the Frenchman Benoît Chamoux were there as well, heading up on an attempt they would abort the next day, in the face of a gathering storm. At Camp III, Rutkiewicz and Parmentier waited for the Barrards, but they never arrived. Their teammates were still not overly concerned, since the French couple were carrying the tent and could presumably have pitched it wherever they found themselves by nightfall.

  In the morning, Rutkiewicz headed down, as did the Italians and Chamoux, but Parmentier insisted on waiting for the Barrards. It took the Polish woman three more days to reach advance base camp. By then, her hands were frostbitten and she was near collapse.

  In a big dome tent at the Italian base camp, Jim Curran joined the vigil for the French climbers. Chamoux had tried to talk Parmentier into descending with him, but after the man had refused to abandon his teammates, Chamoux had given him a radio.

  Eventually, Parmentier had started down in an all-out storm. At base camp, the listeners waited and waited beside the radio. Finally they heard a faint voice: “Ici Michel, ici Michel” (“Michel here”). Still above the top of the fixed ropes, Parmentier was lost in the storm. (One more example of how willow wands marking the route can make all the difference in the world.)

  Chamoux got on the radio and did a remarkable thing: he tried to talk Parmentier down, giving him the “beta” of the route from memory. Curran captured some of the dialogue: “Keep right, keep right, don’t veer to the left, then straight down for perhaps two, three hundred metres … over.” Turning to the others in the dome tent, with the radio off, Chamoux said, “He has perhaps a fifty-fifty chance that he finds the ropes. If not….” Curran fought back tears.

  Hours passed. Parmentier’s voice was weaker with each short burst of broadcast. But at dusk, after one more exchange, Chamoux turned to the others and said, “He has found piss stains in the snow.”

  The piss stains led the played-out climber to the top of the fixed ropes. Two days later, Parmentier staggered down to advance base, where Chamoux met him and helped him the rest of the way to base camp.

  The Barrards never made it down the Abruzzi Ridge. A month later, an Austrian team discovered Liliane’s body at the foot of the south face. Maurice’s body was found two years later, in a crevasse on the Godwin Austen Glacier.

  In the appendix to Curran’s K2: Triumph and Tragedy, Rutkiewicz later coolly pondered the possibilities:

  How did the Barrards die? Possibly part of the summit serac broke off and hit them as they climbed down the Bottleneck. Perhaps the one behind [on the rope], Maurice, was exhausted and fell, taking Liliane with him. Perhaps they lost their way on the big snowslopes below the Bottleneck during the white-out and were avalanched down the South Face. I’m sure, too, we stayed too long at altitude. The cooking on the summit day, the slow descent from the bivouac at 8,300 metres [27,200 feet] both showed that the Barrards were more exhausted than Michel and I realised. That’s how accidents happen.

  At base camp, Parmentier was overcome with anguish about the loss of his partners and about the duty of getting in touch with their families. But Rutkiewicz, in Curran’s opinion, was so blasé, she seemed in some kind of denial. He wrote in K2: Triumph and Tragedy,

  Wanda, whose frostbitten fingers were obviously very painful, seemed to be out of touch with reality, already planning to climb Broad Peak, which in her present condition she was not fit for. Even if she recovered physically, which at K2 Base Camp seemed unlikely, she would be risking much worse frostbite. S
he sounded vague, irrational, and quite obsessed with 8,000-meter peaks.

  Yet at the same time, he noted, “I remained in awe of the strength, skill and determination of the first woman to climb K2, and amazed that the experience had not left her, temporarily at least, satisfied.”

  Curran wrote that passage five years before Rutkiewicz would vanish on Kangchenjunga, but I think he hit the nail on the head. A disturbing fanaticism seizes many of the climbers who decide to go after all fourteen 8,000ers. That’s a frame of mind I did my best to avoid during the eighteen years it took me to complete my Endeavor 8000, which is partly why, among my thirty expeditions, I returned from ten of them without a summit in my pocket. It’s easy to see how a fixation with getting all fourteen peaks climbed becomes an ambitious climber’s driving motivation. As soon as he or she knocks off one peak, plans for the next one go on the front burner. And in some cases, I believe, the climber’s sense of haste is compounded by pressure from sponsors or the media.

  The end of June 1986 had not yet come, and already K2 had taken four lives. The pattern of catastrophe during this “dangerous summer” would be utterly different from the tragedies of 1939 and 1953, which struck within the ranks of the only team on the mountain at the time. It would be different, for that matter, from the 2008 disaster on K2 or the 1996 debacle on Everest, each of which burst forth in a single dramatic two-day event—the freakish storm of May 10–11 on Everest, the serac collapse and benightment of August 1–2 on K2.

  Instead, in 1986, one bad situation after another would develop through the summer, scarring the mountain with a series of isolated tragedies. Around each death, a collective grief would briefly bring members from the different expeditions together, as in the funeral service for Smolich and Pennington or the base camp vigil for the lost French climbers. But then the teams would go back to their separate missions.

  Benoît Chamoux had been deeply concerned about the fate of his compatriots, and he may have saved Parmentier’s life by talking him down to the top of the fixed ropes. But only a week after that hair-raising episode, Chamoux set off again up the Abruzzi in quest of his speed record. Climbing in loose association with the Italians, whose fixed ropes and blazed tracks he took advantage of, on July 4–5 Chamoux essentially soloed the mountain, climbing all the way from base camp to the summit in the astounding time of twenty-three hours. Instead of stopping to camp, he climbed straight through the night, taking short breaks to gulp down food and swallow drinks. He reached the top at 5:00 P.M. on July 5, spent half an hour there, then headed down into his second night. After a short sleep at 24,900 feet with the Italians, he bombed on down to base camp the next day.

  Chamoux’s performance was dazzling; in itself, it almost mocked the notion of climbing an 8,000er by going from camp to camp on successive days or retreating to base to gear up for another attempt, as we had to do in 1992. (“‘Gobsmacked’ was the only word to describe our reactions,” Curran wrote.) That summer, Chamoux was in fantastic shape. Only two weeks earlier, he had soloed Broad Peak in a comparable dash, an exploit that had honed the acclimatization he would need for K2.

  Chamoux’s twin killing was one of the first examples ever performed in the Himalaya or the Karakoram of what I would later call a “twofer” (as in “two for the price of one”). It turns out to be the most efficient way to go after 8,000ers, provided you can keep that edge of fitness and not get worn down by the sheer exertion of it all. In 1995, I would pull off my only “threefer,” climbing Makalu, Gasherbrum I, and Gasherbrum II in a span of two months, though I had a two-week break back home between Makalu and the Gasherbrums. (I would actually have accomplished a “fourfer” had we not stopped less than 350 feet short of Everest’s summit just before my Makalu expedition.) In 2003, J.-C. Lafaille notched his own threefer, climbing Dhaulagiri, Nanga Parbat, and Broad Peak in succession (the last two with me), although the pulmonary edema that felled him on the summit of Broad Peak might have been partly caused by the sheer intensity of his campaign.

  One of the members of the Italian team who also reached the summit on July 5 was a Czech, Jozef Rakoncaj, who three years earlier had climbed K2 by the difficult north ridge. Rakoncaj thus became the first man to climb K2 twice. That’s a remarkable achievement, too. Twenty-three years later, only two other men have climbed K2 twice. Yet I doubt that many K2 aficionados are aware of Rakoncaj’s feat, or have even heard of the man.

  Meanwhile, Jerzy Kukuczka was gearing up for his monumental alpinestyle attempt on the south face—not by the Magic Line, but along an equally serious and committed route to the right, or east, of it. Kukuczka and his Polish teammate, Tadeusz Piotrowski, had bought their way onto a massive international team led by the notorious Dr. Karl Herrligkoffer—in the same way that Scott and I bought places on the Russian expedition in 1992. Herrligkoffer was the German martinet who had sued Hermann Buhl after the Austrian had disobeyed his orders and gone to the top of Nanga Parbat solo in 1953. Seventy years old in 1986, Herrligkoffer had led more than twenty expeditions to the Himalaya and the Karakoram.

  In K2: Triumph and Tragedy, Curran pondered the enigma posed by the German expedition leader:

  An old man whose life had been dominated by mountains yet who had never been able to go above Base Camp; a man who despite his organisational experience, attracted feuds and controversy on almost every venture; and a man whose whole concept of leadership and power seemed to be profoundly at odds with the people who continually placed themselves under his command. Did he, I wondered, actually enjoy the mountains in the same way that I did? Did he enjoy the company of climbers?

  Kukuczka apparently shared that disenchantment. About the rest of the motley international team, he later wrote, “Unfortunately, most of the members did not show enough sporting spirit to attempt even K2’s normal route. I couldn’t believe this since on Polish expeditions we always try to attempt something different.”

  Kukuczka had a right to his national pride. Starting in the 1970s, if any country’s climbers consistently tried really hard new routes and pushed them to the limit, it was Poles, despite their scrawny expedition budgets. They were and still are especially adept at winter ascents on the highest mountains.

  In early June 1986, a team of six—Kukuczka, Piotrowski, three Swiss, and a German—started working their way up the south face. The climbing was so difficult and so scary that one by one all three Swiss and the German dropped out. Not until July 7 did the Poles launch their two-man alpine-style assault. To go as light as possible, they carried only four pitons and a 100-foot rope! Kukuczka led every pitch.

  This was by far the hardest climbing that had been performed to that date on K2, and it took its toll on those tough men. Kukuczka spent a whole day mastering a single desperate pitch. The men had accidently dropped a gas canister, so their stove was useless. The first night, all they had to drink was a small cup of water from snow melted over a candle.

  On the second day, economizing further, they left behind their tent, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, and even food. All they carried was a pair of bivouac sacks and their cameras. In doing so, they made a commitment to go up and over the top, then descend the Abruzzi Ridge, instead of downclimbing the difficult line they had ascended. That was a bold yet somewhat desperate move. By late afternoon, Kukuczka and Piotrowski reached the summit snowfield, where they actually came upon the empty packets of powdered soup left by Maurice Barrard. Kukuczka reached the summit of his twelfth 8,000er at 6:25 P.M., Piotrowski a bit later.

  Descending with a single headlamp, the men had to halt when the bulb abruptly burned out. They dug a hole in the snow at around 27,000 feet and settled in for a second bivouac, “shaking with cold,” Kukuczka later wrote, “until the morning.”

  Growing weaker, desperately thirsty, the men were able to descend only 1,300 feet of the Abruzzi Ridge on July 9. They worried about losing their way on a route they had never ascended, since they had no good knowledge of its landmarks. They endured another bivouac, a nig
ht of “absolute torture.”

  By July 10, the two men had gone almost three days without food or water, and their bivouac sacks were full of holes. But that day they spotted the tents of a Korean party far below, and so knew they were on route. Below the Shoulder, at about 24,500 feet, very near the slope from which Art Gilkey had been swept to his death in 1953, in Kukuczka’s telling, “When I asked Tadeusz for the rope, I discovered that he had forgotten to bring it with him from the bivouac.”

  Rappelling was no longer an option, and the men had not yet reached the top of the fixed ropes. In their exhausted state, they would have to downclimb every foot of the way, each man on his own. Kukuczka wrote in The American Alpine Journal,

  I started down with Tadeusz behind me. The ice was harder than usual. Just after I warned Tadeusz to go a little to my left, I saw one of his crampons slip off. When he tried to bang his other foot into the ice, the crampon shot off his other boot. I was directly below him. He fell full force onto me. I braced and could barely keep my footing, but I was totally unable to catch him. He hurtled down over the edge.

  In shock, Kukuczka continued the descent alone. He was so addled that, as he approached the Korean tents, he later related, “I was under the strange illusion that somehow I might see Tadeusz there alive.”

  The tents were unoccupied. Kukuczka found a radio, but its batteries were dead. “There was a little gas cookstove and I drank and ate,” he would recall. “Then I fell into a deep sleep and woke up the following afternoon. I had slept for 20 hours.”

  Two days later, Kukuczka reached the Godwin Austen Glacier and stumbled back to base camp. He had survived only because, at the time, he was probably the strongest high-altitude climber in the world.

  As a feat of sheer gutsy climbing and endurance, I can admire Jerzy Kukuczka’s ascent of the south face and his skin-of-the-teeth descent. But what he did on K2 went so far beyond the boundaries of what I would ever attempt on an 8,000er that I can’t even imagine participating in such a climb. My guess is that the reason Piotrowski’s crampons came off is that he was too tired, or his fingers were too numb, to tighten the straps properly. We know that he was not wearing the newfangled clip-on crampons but an old-fashioned strap-on pair. If the straps are cinched tight, those are actually less likely to twist off than clipons.