Freedom Climbers (Legends and Lore)

by Bernadette McDonald

  Base camp soon blossomed into a village of brightly coloured tents, with climbers from around the world, all with a single objective: to reach the 8611-metre summit of K2. The South Korean effort was the richest, with miles of fixed lines, an army of high-altitude porters and lots of bottled oxygen. With 16 different types of Korean tea on the menu and a wide selection of films, their mess tent quickly became a popular hub.

  Wanda felt comfortable at K2 base camp. She described the feeling in a postcard to her friend Ewa.

  Dear Ewa,

  My best wishes and kisses through this card. We are at the head of the Baltoro Glacier...everyone is getting along well although I do feel a little isolated because I don’t speak French. There are lots of expeditions and lots of friends here. I feel like I’m at home. The porters recognize me and greet me like a local. They always shout “abi Wanda good.” I don’t really know what it means but I think it’s something good. Don’t forget about me. Kisses and best wishes for my closest friends and family. Wanda.

  Despite their original plans, climbers moved around the mountain, changing routes at will, depending on conditions, weather, their acclimatization, and their skills. This was all illegal, of course, since climbers who apply for and are allotted a specific route are expected to stick to it. But it seemed that nobody was enforcing the rules, and this soon added to the confusion—and crowding—on certain parts of the mountain.

  Wanda’s team of four consisted of herself, Michel Parmentier and the French climbing couple Liliane and Maurice Barrard. The tall, powerfully built, and mustachioed Maurice, with his long grey hair, and his bewitchingly petite, dark-haired wife, made a charming pair. Wanda admired and even envied the Barrards, referring to them as a perfect couple.

  She was less enamoured of Michel. Everything about him irritated Wanda: his unruly brown curls, his hazel eyes and strong cigarettes, his habit of excluding her by speaking French with the Barrards, his arrogant self-confidence. Michel wasn’t all that fond of Wanda, either. As a French journalist, he harboured plans to write the story of the first woman up K2, and that woman was meant to be a French woman—Liliane—not Wanda. The close quarters of their shared tent only magnified the differences between Wanda and Michel.

  Since this was Wanda’s third attempt at the peak, she was already familiar with the route up to 7350 metres. But they were the first climbers on the mountain this season, so they didn’t have the benefit of any camps, broken trail, or trustworthy fixed ropes from other expeditions. Their objective was the Abruzzi Ridge, using lightweight tactics with no supplemental oxygen. They also planned to do it in record time: five days round trip. Their strategy was bold. They decided not to equip the traditional high-altitude camp locations with tents and sleeping bags. Instead, they would set up food and fuel caches along the way. They would carry ultralight tents and sleeping bags so they could bivouac wherever they needed to, depending on the weather, their energy, and the time of day. This would give them more flexibility as they moved upward, but it also left them vulnerable to the mountain’s notorious storms. They could easily become stranded far from their caches. This style of climbing was new to Wanda, and she found it interesting. Although she understood the risks, she was not apprehensive; rather, she was confident that what Liliane could do, she could do too.

  Kurt Diemberger, who was at base camp with his British climbing partner Julie Tullis, recognized, perhaps more clearly than Wanda, the boldness of the French team’s approach, particularly since they were first on the mountain. In his book The Endless Knot, he wrote: “Nobody attempting a ‘lightning dash’ later in the season should compare his climbing time with that of earlier ascents when the route is in a very different state.” His comments may have been a veiled reference to French climber Benoît Chamoux, who later that summer would race up the mountain in just 23 hours. Or perhaps it was just an indisputable statement of fact that the nature of the mountain, with its fixed ropes and established camps, was fundamentally different for those who came later in the season.

  Dear Ewa,

  Maurice and Liliane are okay . . . they are an example of a truly rare climbing marriage. At the same time they are very closed and they function best when they are together ....She is always with Maurice, where I am always stuck with Michel. He is the biggest egotist and egocentric person that I’ve met...a complete narcissist only interested in his own pleasure. He always gives himself the freedom of choice and decisions. This means that it curbs my own freedom. Yesterday he told me ‘why are you even here with us French and not with your friends the Poles over there? I don’t need you at all. But you need me and you’re worse for that’. After that I sort of started to get ready for a solo attempt of K2. Wanda.

  While her partners moved up the mountain, Wanda stayed in base camp, suffering from a bout of high fever and tonsillitis. After several days of rest she finally felt ready to join them, and just three weeks after arriving in base camp they began their summit attempt. It was June 18. Climbing steadily up the Abruzzi Ridge, they spent the first night at Camp I. They skipped Camp II and chose instead to bivouac at 7100 metres on the ridge of the Black Pyramid. Here they cached some of their climbing equipment in order to lighten their packs. They continued up, skipped the usual Camp III situated at 7350 metres and moved higher to bivouac at 7700 metres. Wanda described the site: “It was under the big barrier of the overhanging séracs in a conveniently level patch of snow, which was only a little dangerous.”36

  It was then that their lightweight strategy caught up with them. When Wanda and the Barrards reached a collapsed snow bridge across a crevasse not far above their bivouac site, they decided it was time to rope up. But Michel had forged on ahead with the rope still stowed in his pack because the snow bridge had been intact when he crossed it. In fact, it was his weight that had broken it just as he leapt to safer ground. The three remaining climbers were forced to take a dangerous and exhausting detour to bypass the slot. The top of their detour ended in a difficult overhang about three metres high. They got up it, but not without an enormous outlay of time and energy. Technical climbing becomes an entirely different experience at just under 8000 metres, and their efforts utterly depleted them.

  That day they reached only 7900 metres before they were forced to bivouac again. The time-consuming detour around the snow bridge had forced one more bivouac at extreme altitude—a fatal error, as it would turn out.

  By this time, the tension between Wanda and Michel was so toxic that she had resorted to using a small borrowed tent to avoid sleeping next to the Frenchman. She couldn’t stand the sight of him or the smell of his smoker’s breath. “Three tents for four people sounds a bit much,” she admitted, “but the extra weight in my sack was the price of independence.”37

  They eventually abandoned the rope altogether. This exemplified, perhaps more than anything, the superb condition and skill level of the four climbers. To approach the steep and often icy upper slopes of K2 without a rope required unwavering confidence. Wanda later commented, “It would have been wonderful to find some fixed ropes up there, but who’s going to drag ropes up to that sort of altitude?”38 She could not have imagined the scene more than 20 years later when, despite a spider’s web of fixed ropes, 11 people died on the upper reaches of K2.

  Wanda and her teammates were now in the “death zone,” where the body steadily deteriorates. Their biggest problem was snow, very deep snow. Placing one foot in front of the other on wind-firm, drifted snow is hard enough at altitude, but lifting one’s leg out of each snowy hole only to plunge even deeper into the next, leaning on one’s ice axe and gasping for breath, is agonizing work. The enormous effort shatters the climber out front breaking trail, and the ones behind become progressively colder as the pace inevitably bogs down. They took turns at first, but Michel proved strongest, so he eventually took over the arduous job.

  He found a small rock platform at 8300 metres where they could bivouac one last time. They now had just one stove, one two-person tent an
d no sleeping bags. It was their third night above 7500 metres.

  Below them stretched the full expanse of the mountain: the overhanging wall of ice under which they had climbed (known as the Bottleneck), the Shoulder, the Black Pyramid, House’s Chimney, and the lower slopes leading to the Godwin Austen Glacier. The technical difficulties were below them, and they were now very close to the summit.

  Wanda was pressed up against Michel as they were forced to spoon in the tiny tent. She recoiled at his touch, despite his warmth. Her mind raced, reviewing again and again what might happen the next day—summit day. She felt strong—maybe not as strong as Michel, but she still had some reserve.

  They awoke early on the morning of June 23. The day was splendid: sunny, cloudless, and still. Wanda, who was last to leave the tent, caught up with the others just as they were stopping for a short soup break. She was surprised at this unusual behaviour, this lounging about, cooking so near the summit. Could she be hallucinating? But she wasn’t; the three French climbers had settled in for a hot lunch. Wanda smiled at the Gallic obsession with food, declined the invitation, and continued on alone. The others seemed not to notice.

  At age 43 she was as strong and confident as she had ever been on a high mountain, physically at the peak of her powers. By 10:15 a.m. she was on the top, becoming the first Pole and the first woman to climb K2. She laughed. She cried. She knelt and prayed. “At that moment I felt I had a gift of infinite time ....I felt no triumph, but I did feel that God was near me....”39

  Then she wrote her name, along with Liliane Barrard’s, on a piece of paper that claimed the first women’s ascent. She wrapped it up in a plastic bag and placed it under a stone a short distance below the main summit. Liliane had still not arrived, so it might have been a little premature, and perhaps overly generous. But she was very clear about noting her own arrival time—10:15 a.m.—and after Liliane’s name she left a blank.

  Wanda sat down on the summit and waited. And waited. The sparkling clear day was extremely cold, so, in order to stay warm, she climbed a short way down the northeast side and collected a few stones as souvenirs. Back to the top and more waiting. She began a mental list of the friends she might give her precious K2 stones to; there were lots of possibilities, but number one on her list was Charlie Houston, the American who had tried so hard in 1938 and 1953. She liked Charlie and felt that he had deserved the first ascent, not the Italians. He had certainly earned a rock from the summit.

  As the cold began creeping into her extremities she realized she would have to start descending. No sooner had she started down the South Face than she saw her partners labouring up in her tracks, so she went back up. They finally joined her on the summit at around 11 a.m. for an emotional round of hugs.

  At noon, cold and tired, the four began their descent, the most dangerous part of any climb. Pressing ahead, Wanda reached their bivouac site at 8300 metres and stopped for a brief rest. When the flagging Maurice Barrard arrived, he stated they would have to spend the night. Wanda uncharacteristically agreed, although she knew another night that high on the mountain would mean further deterioration of their bodies. She may have wanted to stay with her team, or maybe it was the gauze of altitude that was clouding her judgement. She later wrote about this critical moment: “I was surprised, but not unhappy. ‘I don’t need to go down today’, I thought. I was tired, but not exhausted....I was not worried. But I should have been....I didn’t know in the sunshine that death was following us down.”40

  Once again they crammed into the two-person tent with no sleeping bags. After a restless, cold and uncomfortable night, they awoke even more fatigued. Wanda had taken two and a half sleeping tablets and was still dizzy the next morning. Michel was impatient to head down. The Barrards were very quiet.

  Still climbing without a rope, each of them now had to make their way down two of the most dangerous sections of the mountain. They inched their way across the icy, downward-sloping, 50-degree traverse, knowing the consequences of a fall would be fatal. Wanda concentrated on keeping her balance as she tried to fight off the lingering effects of the pills. Michel was moving faster and was first to reach the top of the Bottleneck, a narrow gully of even steeper ice, loose rock, and unconsolidated snow.

  At that moment, out of the corner of her eye, Wanda saw Michel falling, tumbling faster and faster down the chute, only to emerge unscathed from a snowdrift near the bottom. He didn’t look back, just dusted himself off and kept going. After the shock and adrenaline had subsided, Wanda refocused and went back to the task at hand. She cautioned herself with each placement of her boot: “Careful, Wanda, careful! No one can help you here, no one can get you down ...you are alone.”

  Her concentration was so intense that she forgot about the Barrards. But she knew they had each other, whereas she was on her own. When she neared the bottom of the gully, she stopped to catch her breath and looked back to see the couple moving slowly near the top of the Bottleneck. Maurice was above Liliane, and Wanda was relieved because, although the Bottleneck was steep, it wasn’t icy; there was plenty of soft snow.

  As she continued down, a bank of clouds moved in, surrounding the mountain and obscuring the crevasse-riddled snowfield in front of her. Navigating this minefield of slots was dangerous in good visibility; now it was almost suicidal. Yet she felt strangely calm and euphoric: “My sense of invulnerability was a danger, but it was also allowing me to function without physical inhibition and preserving me from panic. It saved my life by letting me climb to the utmost of my skills and permitting my luck to hold.”41 Wanda was in fact—perhaps unconsciously—drawing on her many years of experience in conditions such as these. Despite her addled mind, her muscle memory was strong, her instincts reliable. It was her cumulative knowledge—not just luck—that got her through that day, high on K2, without a rope.

  She caught up with Michel at 7700 metres. That night, buffeted by the wind and snow lashing at their tent, the two got very little rest. The next morning he told her he would wait for the Barrards, but since they were running out of gas, he urged Wanda to continue down with some Basque and Italian climbers camped nearby. She agreed and set out.

  Snow began to fall. Thick fog enveloped them. Worn out from the climb and too many nights above 8000 metres, Wanda couldn’t keep up with the others and was soon left alone on the mountain. She struggled to see their tracks, but the wind quickly drifted them in with fresh snow. By this time she had lost her gloves and was using her reserve pair, which were too thin for the frigid temperatures.

  Then, in the distance, she spied two strokes of darkness against the white—ski poles! And just below them, the fixed ropes. In her intense relief at reaching the security of the fixed lines, and in a befuddled state of mind, she thought the Basques must have left the poles for her. She took them and slogged on down, clinging to the ropes in order to avoid being blown off the mountain by the storm, which had whipped itself into a raging gale. She stopped. A terrible possibility had occurred to her.

  What if the poles had not been left for her use but to signal the beginning of the fixed lines for those descending above her? They would now be in a much more dangerous situation. Yet she knew she was too far gone to retrace her steps and undo the damage; she had to go down to survive. She concentrated on the repetitious yet lifesaving movements of clipping her carabiner into the fixed rope, sliding the carabiner down, reclipping at the next rope, never losing her concentration. She later described that desperate descent as her worst day on K2.

  It was evening before Wanda reached her tent at the foot of the Black Pyramid. She collapsed in a heap and slept. There she waited, another day and another night. She forced herself to heat some water and eat a little. Each small movement hurt. Her frostbitten hands struggled with the most basic tasks: zipping her jacket, lighting the stove, opening the soup packets, balancing the precious liquid. Still her teammates did not arrive.

  She strained to recall her last glimpse of Maurice and Liliane, inching their way d
own the Bottleneck. Was there some clue in their position on the slope? Had she missed something? And where was Michel? She was sure they had spoken at 7700 metres, but maybe not. She was no longer certain. She felt terribly alone. Would she be the only one of her team to make it down alive? Drifting in and out of consciousness, Wanda lost track of who was on the mountain and where. Everything that was still alive inside of her screamed get off this mountain while you still can!

  She stuffed the pathetic remains of her climb into the pack: her stove, the empty fuel bottle, the pot encrusted with soup remnants and finally her soggy sleeping bag. She crawled out of the tent to continue the interminable descent and saw a figure below her. It was Benoît Chamoux on his way up to help Michel, who had radioed that he was on the fixed lines but in desperate need of assistance. Benoît explained that in the whiteout conditions, Michel had had a difficult time locating the fixed lines, and it was Benoît who had talked him down the upper part of the mountain, metre by metre. She wondered about those ski poles: would they have made a difference?

  Still no word from the Barrards.

  At this point two Polish climbers on their way up to help her appeared. Wanda’s stoicism finally crumbled and she gave in to her emotions, weeping quietly as she clung to them. After all the loneliness and bitterness and competitiveness, someone cared about her.

  By now Wanda’s face was frozen, as were her hands and feet. When British filmmaker Jim Curran watched her hobble into base camp, he was horrified at the change in her appearance. Radiant before the climb, she seemed to have aged 10 years in 10 days. “Her face seemed to have caved in,” he said.