K2

by Ed Viesturs

  Thus on August 7, the climbers at Camp IV decided against going down in the whiteout for fear of getting lost. It makes you want to weep with frustration: a string of willow wands below Camp IV could have saved lives.

  On the morning of August 8, Diemberger awoke to hear Bauer’s voice over the wind. At first he could not make out the words. He called back for clarification.

  “Kurt!” Bauer shouted. “Julie died last night.”

  “It was like a hammer blow,” Diemberger later wrote. “Alan, at my side, tried to comfort me. I heard his words without grasping their meaning.”

  Bauer carried Tullis’s body to the abandoned tent, cut a hole in the roof with his ax, and deposited the corpse inside it. As heartless as that may seem, it was obviously preferable to keeping a dead body in the cramped Austrian tent.

  That same day, August 8, the stranded climbers ran out of stove fuel. They could no longer turn snow into pots of life-saving water. They tried to scoop handfuls of snow and melt them in their mouths. Many a person dying of thirst in the cold has tried to do the same, but it’s a desperate remedy that doesn’t really work, because the loss of precious energy in melting the snow outweighs the minimal gain of liquid.

  Meanwhile, Al Rouse, who had been the strongest of the seven, began to fade. Diemberger recalled,

  Last night was bad, he was thrashing about, agitated, like a chained animal. He would lunge suddenly, delirious, quarreling with destiny. I tried in vain to calm him…. He begs continuously for water, which we no longer have. I put a piece of slush to his lips, which he sucks greedily.

  The survivors knew better than to hope for rescue from below. But all through the day on August 9, they stayed in their tents, certain that they could not get down in the ongoing storm. Only the next morning, when they woke to blue sky (though the wind was still raging), did they rouse themselves to action.

  Willi Bauer was the motivating force. “Aussa! Aussa!” he yelled at Wieser and Imitzer—colloquial German for “Out! Out!” In the other tent, Diemberger and Mrufka slowly put on their boots. They knew that Rouse was now beyond help, but, as Diemberger put it, “The prospect of leaving him here is a ghastly one.” Tottering around outside the tents, he noted, was “like having to learn to walk again.”

  Diemberger paid a last visit to Tullis. He later wrote, “I cannot see her face. The tent is half caved-in, but has not collapsed. I move the sleeping bag sealing the opening, and put the down jacket over her feet…. For the last time, I touch her—then I leave her alone.”

  By this point, the other four survivors had already started down, but almost at once, the catastrophe deepened. Wieser and Imitzer were able to walk only a little more than 300 feet before they fell down in the snow. Mrufka and Bauer desperately tried to get them back on their feet, but had to give up.

  Only minutes later, Diemberger came upon the doomed men.

  I reach Hannes. He is sitting in the snow, with his back to me. A few metres further on Alfred is lying face down on the furrowed surface, completely still. He must be dead. Hannes moves his arms weakly, rowing the air in slow motion…. Then I see his face. His eyes, blank, stare into space. He does not see me. I shout his name, but he does not even move his head.

  To save himself, Diemberger, too, had to leave Imitzer and Wieser behind.

  Throughout the early stages of the descent, Mrufka was stronger and faster than Diemberger, and the equal of Bauer. But all three were in a hallucinatory trance. When Diemberger finally caught up to the other two, Bauer suddenly asked, “Do you have anything to eat? Have you brought a stove?”

  “No, of course not,” Diemberger answered in astonishment. It is a testimony to the sheer will to live that the three survivors were able to keep descending over tricky ground, on a route unsecured by fixed ropes. Their thoughts were fixated on Camp III at 24,100 feet, where they expected to find tents still standing, perhaps with food and stoves and fuel still in them. Late that afternoon they reached the camp, only to find to their horror that ice avalanches had destroyed everything.

  The only blessing was that fixed ropes had been strung continuously from camp to the lower slopes of the Abruzzi. But here a trivial technical detail worked its cruel mischief. Neither Bauer nor Diemberger had a descending device, so each man simply clipped in to the fixed ropes with a carabiner and went down hand over hand. Mrufka, however, had a Sticht plate, which she insisted on affixing to each rope. A Sticht plate is a good belay tool, but for rappelling, it’s far less easy to use than a figure-eight device. At each anchor, Mrufka had to fiddle arduously with her plate to disengage it from the upper rope and attach it to the lower one. Diemberger tried to persuade her to use a carabiner instead, but Mrufka either refused or didn’t understand.

  As they forged on down into the darkness, the two Austrians lost track of Mrufka. They assumed she was just behind them, but they would never see her again.

  Trailing behind Bauer, Diemberger could barely hold on to the fixed ropes. He half-fell, half-slid down the cords strung along the nearly vertical fissure of House’s Chimney. But at Camp II, he found Bauer in a tent, melting snow over a stove. The two men drank as much as they could, then fell asleep.

  It was not until evening of August 11 that the two refugees completed their descent. The first person to greet Diemberger was Jim Curran, who of course hoped it would be Al Rouse emerging from the high death trap. According to Diemberger, Curran said, “You’re safe at last!”

  “I’ve lost Julie,” he answered.

  Later Curran wrote,

  If you had lined up every member of each expedition and asked yourself who would survive an ordeal like this, Willi and Kurt would come at the bottom of most people’s lists. But in the end their slow, plodding, energy-conserving approach must have paid off.

  Of the seven climbers who had headed for the summit on August 4, five had perished. The toll for the “dangerous summer” had reached thirteen.

  To this day, in the long annals of mountaineering in the Himalaya and the Karakoram, only one season on any peak has ever been more deadly than K2 in 1986. In 1937 on Nanga Parbat, seven German climbers and nine high-altitude porters were crushed to death by a monstrous avalanche as they slept in their tents at Camp IV. That calamity, however, occurred in a single instant, as a result of a collapse of a hanging glacier far above—an act of God, as it were. In terms of a season punctuated by one unrelated disaster after another, snuffing out the lives of some of the world’s best mountaineers, K2 in 1986 remains unmatched.

  The terrible summer had its impact in mountaineering circles in the United States, though it did not really reverberate among the general public. For one thing, “only” two of the thirteen victims were Americans. The hue and cry in this country about the Everest tragedy of 1996 had everything to do with how many of the principals involved, from Scott Fischer to Beck Weathers to Doug Hansen to Jon Krakauer, were Americans. And though K2 had an able chronicler in Jim Curran, the British writer did not play a pivotal role in the drama, as Krakauer did on Everest. Finally, on K2 there was no simple morality play to which the public could reduce the complicated chain of accidents—nothing like the perversely satisfying “they got what they deserved” formula so many readers took away from Into Thin Air.

  A lead article in the American Alpine Journal by Charlie Houston, titled “Death in High Places,” tried to wring a moral lesson from the 1986 season. Among other criticisms, Houston wrote,

  Too many of the deaths were avoidable….

  Also commonplace were outrageous behavior, intense rivalry, and disregard of mountain ethics—which caused several deaths. Not many years ago some of the things that were done would have led to excommunication by the climbing fraternity.

  Houston’s strictures were among the first in a vein that has now become commonplace, especially in response to the “circuses” on Everest every spring, as selfishness, competition, and dehumanization overwhelm compassion and brotherhood.

  The most balanced and compreh
ensive coverage of the K2 tragedies in the American media came in an article in Outside magazine titled “The Dangerous Summer,” cowritten by Greg Child (four years before he would climb K2) and Jon Krakauer (ten years before he would climb Everest). For the most part, Child and Krakauer avoided finger-pointing, but they ended the piece with a quote they had elicited from Jim Curran:

  “If anything was common to most of the deaths, it was that a lot of people were very ambitious and had a lot to gain by climbing K2—and a lot to lose as well. Casarotto, the Austrians, Al Rouse, the Barrards were all—the word that comes to mind is overambitious. If you’re going to try alpine-style ascents of 8,000-meter peaks, you’ve got to leave yourself room to fail.”

  Too many people on K2 last summer, it would appear, did not.

  Twenty-two years later, commenting on the 2008 K2 catastrophe for National Geographic Adventure, Child would strike a more sardonic note: “What the hell—climbing is dangerous.”

  In Great Britain and Europe, however, the K2 season caused a huge furor. The British press, including some of the climbing journals, raked the Austrians over the coals for “abandoning” Al Rouse. This charge was, of course, ridiculous: by August 10, Rouse was too feeble even to stand, and it was all Diemberger and Bauer could do to get themselves down the mountain. Likewise, British journals and newspapers castigated Diemberger for making a martyr of the supposedly reluctant Julie Tullis—despite all the evidence that their “endless knot” was very much a mutual passion.

  Some of the French press went so far as to blame Michel Parmentier for abandoning Maurice and Liliane Barrard, even though he almost lost his own life by waiting for them as long as he did at Camp III. In the German-language press, Bauer and Diemberger, both of whom lost frostbitten digits to amputation, feuded bitterly, with the public taking one side or another. Even the Koreans were scapegoated for climbing too slowly, in too old-fashioned a style.

  On the last page of K2: Triumph and Tragedy, Curran stepped back from all the accusations to editorialize:

  Exploring and pushing the limits has always been the name of the game, whether in rock climbing, alpinism, or Himalayan mountaineering. But the disastrous summer of K2 must remain a salutary reminder that the limits are still there: pushing them is one thing, ignoring them another. Mountaineering will never be a safe activity and would not be worth doing if it were.

  That last line is a credo by which all climbers live. When I look back on the summer of 1986 on K2, I can see all kinds of small mistakes that led to fatal outcomes. But the scenario that most haunts me is the picture of those seven climbers stranded at Camp IV waiting, day after day, when they must have known that their only hope of getting off K2 alive was to head down at once. It reminds me of a very wise saying about mountaineering that my wife, Paula, repeats often: “Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, you don’t.” No wonder the mantra that kept running through my head on K2 in 1992 was “Remember ‘86!”

  In the summer of 1987, not one climber reached the top of K2. But a Japanese-Pakistani expedition pushing up the Abruzzi Ridge came upon Mrufka’s body between Camps II and III. She was frozen in place on a steep slope, her Sticht plate still clipped to a fixed rope, which was also wrapped around her wrist. In a remarkable operation, the team carried her body down to the foot of the Abruzzi Ridge and buried her there.

  That summer, several Japanese and several Spaniards reached the Shoulder and climbed into the Bottleneck couloir before being turned back by bad weather. They found no trace of Alfred Imitzer, Hannes Wieser, Julie Tullis, or Alan Rouse. The two Austrians may have been avalanched off the ridge between August 1986 and July 1987. Tullis and Rouse were most likely entombed by the winter snows. As is true for so many victims of K2, the bodies of those four climbers have never been found.

  Epilogue: The Holy Grail

  Despite the title of Jim Curran’s book about the 1986 season, in the story of K2, there’s more tragedy than triumph. The first ascents of other 8,000ers unfurled as glorious sagas of perseverance and daring—the French dashing up Annapurna in 1950 after wasting a month simply trying to find the mountain, Hermann Buhl going solo in 1953 to the top of Nanga Parbat, Hillary and Tenzing blithely solving the last obstacles on Everest the same year, Joe Brown and George Band stopping twenty feet short of the top of Kangchenjunga in 1955 out of respect for the beliefs of the people of Sikkim, for whom the mountain was a god and a protector. (Our team did the same on Kangchenjunga in 1989.)

  But the first ascent of K2, in 1954, will forever be clouded by the bitter and interminable controversy it spawned. If you believe Walter Bonatti’s version of the events of July 30 and 31—and by now, most people in the climbing world do accept that version—the dominant character in the summit duo, Achille Compagnoni, must go down in history as one of the indelible bad guys of mountaineering. For fear of sharing the triumph with the younger, better climber, Compagnoni was apparently willing to let Bonatti and Amir Mahdi freeze to death in an open bivouac. And the premeditated ruse Compagnoni devised to prevent that sharing—hiding Camp IX behind rocks above a dangerous traverse—turned the bravest Hunza climber of his day into a frostbite victim who would never be able to go back to the high mountains.

  The heroes of K2—for me, the list is headed by Bonatti, Fritz Wiessner, and the whole 1953 American team—remain men lastingly scarred by defeat and, in the cases of Bonatti and Wiessner, by betrayal. Toward the end of Curran’s book, he tries to enumerate the triumphs of the 1986 season: Wanda Rutkiewicz becoming the first woman to climb K2, Benoît Chamoux’s dazzling twenty-three-hour ascent, the Poles claiming the Magic Line after it had turned back others—but those deeds are so far overshadowed by the thirteen deaths that 1986 will forever figure as a black season in the annals of mountaineering in the Karakoram.

  Ever since Bob Bates and Charlie Houston wrote their classic narrative of the 1953 campaign, “the savage mountain” has become the sobriquet that has stuck to K2. John Barry and Jim Curran (in his historical survey) incorporated that label in the titles of their own K2 books. Last summer, the nickname recurrently appeared in the media accounts of the 2008 disaster.

  It doesn’t work for me, though. K2 is not some malevolent being, lurking there above the Baltoro, waiting to get us. It’s just there. It’s indifferent. It’s an inanimate mountain made of rock, ice, and snow. The “savageness” is what we project onto it, as if we blame the peak for our own misadventures on it.

  There’s no denying how dangerous a mountain K2 is, however. According to the website EverestNews.com, in 2008 alone at least 290 climbers reached the top of Mount Everest, while only 1 person died on the mountain. No fewer than 77 men and women topped out on a single day in late May. On K2 that summer, 18 climbers reached the summit, while 11 died trying. According to the most accurate count, by May 2009, 299 people have stood on top of K2, while 77 have died on its flanks. That’s a pretty daunting ratio—it means that for every 4 climbers who reach the summit, at least 1 dies. (The ratio for Everest is roughly 19 to 1.)

  Those cold statistics mask a discrepancy that only further underscores the danger of K2. Every spring and fall, Everest now swarms with relative novices, the clients on guided expeditions who make up the bulk of the traffic. It’s not surprising that some of them should come to grief. K2, however, is still almost exclusively the province of experienced mountaineers, men and women who are used to extricating themselves from the most perilous predicaments.

  It’s also true, though, that on Everest experienced “professional” climbers make mistakes and get in trouble. In the public eye, all clients get scapegoated as dilettantes who have no business being on the mountain. But many clients, including ones I’ve guided, have been training as amateur climbers for years before they sign up for Everest. In 1996, the clients got most of the blame for the tragedy. Shouldn’t the leaders have absorbed much of the criticism for mistakes that led to the disaster?

  In 2004, the French climbing writer Charlie Buffet wrote a d
eft little book called La Folie du K2 (K2 Madness). In it, he listed the ten French mountaineers who had reached the top of K2 to that date: Éric Escoffier, Daniel Lacroix, Benoît Chamoux, Maurice and Liliane Barrard, Michel Parmentier, Pierre Béghin, Christophe Profit, Chantal Mauduit, and Jean-Christophe Lafaille. That list reads like a Who’s Who of French mountaineering. Laconically, Buffet commented, “At this time, only two of them are still alive, Profit and Lafaille. All the rest died in the mountains.”

  Since my great friend J.-C. Lafaille disappeared on Makalu in 2006, that reduces Buffet’s list of the living to one: Christophe Profit, who with Béghin made the first ascent of K2’s northwest ridge in 1991. And with the death of the Frenchman Hugues d’Aubarède in August 2008, Buffet’s roster becomes even more doleful.

  Buffet closes his book with a powerful quotation from Lafaille. Since I don’t read French, I’d been unaware of J.-C.’s comments until this year, when a friend translated the passage for me. (In the book, it’s not clear whether J.-C., who got to the top of K2 in 2001, wrote the passage for a climbing magazine or simply spoke it during an interview with Buffet.)

  It’s a superb, immense mountain that crushes you. Here the risks are palpable, you can see them. Not far from base camp, there’s this memorial [the Gilkey-Puchoz memorial]. You feel as though you’re in a cemetery. To reach the foot of the [Abruzzi] face, you walk along the Godwin Austen Glacier, where a Spanish friend of mine found the body of Maurice Barrard two years ago. It’s only a fifteen-minute walk from the tents where we lived for two months. And every time that I took that path, I found human debris there—clothes, shoes, a pelvis. The whole history of this mountain lies heavy on your shoulders.