THE DESERT AIR BLEW IN OUR FACES, drying our skin and chapping our lips. We were standing in the back of an open jeep, and our Pakistani driver hit holes in the road with such speed we bounced off our feet and had to hold on to keep from flying out. An enormous dust cloud rose off the powder-dry road, and only now and again could we glimpse the two jeeps behind us. There were five of us in the lead jeep. The other nine climbers, our Pakistani liaison officer, and the four strong, good-looking men from Hunza we had hired to help carry loads on the mountain were in the rear jeeps. Together we were the 1978 American K2 Expedition.
Jim Wickwire, with us in the lead jeep, was the first to raise the question.
“Those guys back there are eating some dust,” he said. “Since it is such a sensitive subject, it might be diplomatic to pull over and let Whittaker take the lead.”
The rest of us immediately agreed. When we left Shigar that morning, we had intended to pull up rear position, but our driver, still seeing checkered flags after his daredevil drive the day before from Skardu, had bolted out in front. It was the departure from Skardu that had raised the ire of Jim Whittaker and caused his reprimand. He was not mad that we had sped off to avoid eating dust, but because our leaving without warning disrupted plans of the town’s officials to give us a farewell send-off. Jim had been left standing in the street with the officials as we roared by, shifting gears and yelling and hooting and spewing up clouds of dust. The officials were also left holding the souvenir postcards we were supposed to sign. The photographer, who was to take the team photo with the officials standing next to us, slowly packed his camera.
But Jim’s embarrassment was only part of the problem. Our liaison officer—a Pakistani Army sergeant-major assigned to escort our expedition—had threatened to quit the expedition on the spot. Having set up the meeting, he had lost credibility. “If you cannot control your own team members, I will not be a part of this expedition,” he announced, and he reminded Jim that the bridges they were crossing were military installations. Since he would not be along to see that no pictures were taken of them, he would have to confiscate all our film.
Jim had had to plead with him—and pleading is not necessarily something Whittaker likes to do—telling Saleem, “It’s only the way Americans do things. It doesn’t mean they won’t obey me—it was just that they didn’t want to stay behind in the dust from the other jeeps. It was kind of a joke,” he said, sheepishly.
Jim had managed to pacify Saleem and persuaded him not to abandon the expedition, something that would have effectively stopped us before we started. No expedition is permitted to climb in Pakistan without a military liaison officer, and without Saleem to control the porters who would haul our equipment to the base of K2, we wouldn’t have had a prayer of reaching the mountain anyway. Jim was really angry. What we thought was innocent tomfoolery (we didn’t know about the bank officials and the autographs and the photographs) ended that night in Shigar with Jim lecturing us on team unity, on individuals thinking only of themselves, on how could we possibly expect to make one of the world’s most difficult climbs if we weren’t willing to work together? So, when Jim Wickwire suggested we show contrition and let the others pass, we all heartily agreed. We yelled up to the driver to pull over.
John Roskelley, who had been over this road before when he came to the Karakoram Mountains on another climbing expedition, had already learned the hazards of desert travel. He wet his bandana from his drinking bottle and tied it around his mouth and nose bandit-style.
The other two jeeps passed and Whittaker waved; we could see he was smiling. Apparently, he was willing to forget our peccadillo, and we all felt the problem had been worked out. Each of us knew that in the early stages of climbing expeditions, rancor and gall are like blisters that have to be aired and dried, lest they fester to crippling wounds; we had all seen how, on the 1975 K2 expedition, arguing and bickering had contributed to an early defeat, and we resolved not to let that happen this time.
That morning when we left Shigar I had still felt uneasy, but my optimism was returning. The climb had to be a collaborative effort if we had any dreams of success, and it seemed that everyone was well aware of that. There was no doubt we had bitten off a big hunk—and a dangerous one, too. That fact had been laid bare before us two days back when we learned of a tragedy on Chris Bonington’s expedition; they had been trying a new route on K2, but now they were on their way home. Nevertheless, our team had a positive air. I remembered the pact we had made before leaving the States: we would work together, giving as much as we could, to get somebody—anybody—to the top of K2.
The road climbed along the foothills flanking the broad alluvial plain of the Shigar River. Behind, we could see the even broader valley where the Shigar joins the mighty Indus, which flows from the distant plains of Tibet. Above us, a ridge bordering the valley rose to such a height that it supported glaciers, glistening brightly against the cobalt blue sky. Below, in the plain, we could see oases outlined by tall Lombardy poplars, and here and there big, bushy mulberries, ripe with red berries. The poplars formed borders around fields of wheat, green in early summer. It was only in such oases, irrigated by water flowing from the high, perpetual snows, that the Baltis—the people who inhabit these valleys of Baltistan—could survive against the desert.
It seemed odd, traveling through desert, that we were on our way to try to climb the second highest mountain in the world. All of us except Diana Jagersky, our Base Camp manager, had climbed at least once before in the Himalaya. But except for Rob Schaller, Jim Wickwire, Dianne Roberts, and Jim Whittaker, who had been on the 1975 K2 climb, and John Roskelley, who had been in the Karakoram the year before, all our experience had been in the Himalaya of Nepal. In Nepal, the seasonal monsoon brings thick, warm rain from the Bay of Bengal and turns the foothills into jungles. The Karakoram, however, are in the lee of the northwest end of the Himalaya proper, and therefore are sheltered far inland from most of the rain that comes up from Pakistan, creating desert conditions in the lower valleys. Nevertheless, at high altitudes there are still many storms.
Our jeep downshifted as it crested a small hill and began a steep descent to an arroyo bottom. We had left the area of trees and villages; the floor of the desert was covered with stones the size of soccer balls, washed down from the bordering hills, with desert sage sparsely and boldly rooted between the rocks. The smell of sage blossoms was strong. The stream had been bridged by two sturdy planks, but the planks had washed out and now we had to detour downstream to a suitable ford. Our jeep’s suspension strained as it moved across the larger wash-bottom rocks, and water swirled up to the top of our tires. We climbed steeply up the other side—all of us still holding on so we wouldn’t bounce out. Once up the opposite bank, we could see ahead the long line of tractors, each pulling a trailer, that had left Skardu ahead of us. The tractors carried our food and equipment—all 19,250 pounds of it.
In all, there were fourteen tractors, and we could see most of them stopped behind one that appeared to be broken down. We pulled up to the rear and walked over to it. Most of them were nearly new Massey Fergusons, probably from some aid program, and each pulled a homemade trailer filled with the sturdy cardboard boxes containing our gear. We had been apprehensive about sending our equipment ahead of us. But since the tractors only traveled at twenty miles an hour, it was either that or have them arrive a day behind us at the end of the road.
Subadar-Major Mohammed Saleem Khan, our robust liaison officer, had assured us our gear would be safe: he had personally told the tractor drivers to make certain each item arrived intact. Saleem was six feet tall and, at the beginning of the trek, a sturdy two hundred pounds. He wore a camouflage field shirt, a camouflage hat with one brim folded up Aussi style, and khaki pants. He had short, thick fingers, and the habit of officiously holding up his index finger when he made a point. When he spoke, it was with much bombast, as a lord might speak to a servant. Though we did not understand Urdu, we sensed that those to
whom he spoke, listened. We were never too concerned about our equipment. We were also happy he was our liaison officer because we knew his firm manner was our best hope against crippling porter strikes—an important factor in the failure of the 1975 K2 expedition.
As it turned out, the tractor was not broken. Its trailer had lost a keeper-washer on the wheel bearing, and the driver was fashioning another one from a tin can. It looked like the operation might take some time, so we moved a few boulders to open a detour, motioned the waiting tractors and jeeps around, and continued on. We had less than an hour’s travel to the end of the road.
There were dozens upon dozens of Baltis walking along the road, all porters we had contracted with earlier in Skardu, and all of whom had walked for two days and nights to meet us at the roadhead where the trek to Base Camp would start. They were dressed ragamuffin in homespun trousers and coats, and each wore a wool cap rolled at the sides and flat on top—the Gilgit cap, as it is called. Each carried a hiking stick the length of a cane, but with a crossbar carefully jointed across the top, forming a T-shape.
We had hired from among the people of Skardu 100 of the total 365 porters we would need to carry our gear to Base Camp. On an appointed day, hundreds of them had lined up in an open square of the village; Rob Schaller, our team’s chief physician, had to sort through the lot and choose the healthiest. Their names were recorded in an accounting book, and each man pressed his inked thumb next to his name, sealing the contract. Packing the few belongings they would take on the long approach march in cloth satchels tied around their backs, they set out that afternoon hiking toward the end of the jeep road. There, the tractors would dump the loads: loads that would be carried on foot, across deserts, through narrow canyons dangerous with falling rock, and over long glaciers, 110 miles to Base Camp.
It was at the trailhead that we planned to hire the remaining number of our army of porters. In total, we had 280 loads to be carried. But we would need more porters than we had loads, because most of the country we were about to march through was uninhabited; unlike Nepal, where porters each night procure their own food in local villages, here it would have to be hauled with us. We would need 70 porters to carry food for the 280, and another 15 to carry food for the 70 carrying food for the 280. Special couriers had been dispatched from Skardu to send word to the villages that on that day, June 22, we would be hiring at the trailhead. If the number of people who had shown up for jobs in Skardu was any indication, we would find more than enough porters waiting for us a few minutes up the road.
Ahead, we could see the main Shigar valley continuing several miles until it narrowed and disappeared in a turn behind high mountains. Some distance up the valley, there were summits of impressive peaks certainly over twenty thousand feet high. Rob Schaller pointed out another valley that breached the Shigar just a mile or so beyond our jeep. It was the valley of the Braldu River; the Braldu we would follow some sixty miles, hiking along its bank, across alluvium cut by deep wash gullies called nullahs that we would endlessly descend and ascend, over cliffs that sometimes narrowed and bottlenecked the river, fording icewater tributaries and, at one place, building a rope crossing over a river—too swollen to ford—whose bridge had fallen down. All the way to the Baltoro Glacier. Then, for some fifty miles, we would hike on one of the largest temperate-zone glaciers in the world—a glacier covered with rock debris fallen from the bordering slopes of the most awesome mountains on earth. At the end of this glacier we would find K2.
Farther up the road we could see hundreds of Baltis trying to crowd under the shade of a single tree growing in an expanse of otherwise barren desert, covered only with sage. When they heard our jeeps, they waved and cheered, running toward us. There were obviously many more of them—several hundred, at least—than there were available jobs; we suspected it might be a task keeping order when they learned there was not enough work for everyone.
On the 1975 expedition the team had had no control over the selection of porters, and as a result, they ended up with many weak men who became seriously ill later on the approach march. Rob Schaller remembered well what it was like:
“There was so much sickness I had two hospital tents set up all the time,” he said, “with as many as thirty people at once in them. I was so busy with the sick and injured, I didn’t even feel like I was part of the expedition, especially with the other climbers so afraid of contracting a sickness from the porters or from me since I was working so close to them. I remember graphically once having a guy in the tent who was stuperous with spinal meningitis, and I had just done a lumbar puncture on him. There were a couple of other guys with pneumonia and shaking chills and high fever, and Dianne came to the tent with my dinner. She set the meal in front of the tent, and from a distance yelled, ‘Your dinner is ready.’ ”
To avoid such problems we had three doctors this time, and Rob decided to give each porter a brief physical before he was hired. To speed up the process, the two other doctors on our team, Skip Edmonds and Chris Chandler, helped examine the porters. Jim Wickwire and John Roskelley milled through the crowds selecting those who looked strongest and fittest, or those with commendation papers certifying good performance on previous expeditions, and sent them over to line up in front of the doctors. If they passed the physical, they were directed to another group where their names were recorded.
The rest of us tried to keep order. Many porters tried to sneak across to join the group of men already selected. John Roskelley and I each had hiking sticks commandeered from a porter; when any of them tried to break ranks we would soundly whap them—not injuring anybody, but using enough force to keep them in line. It was reminiscent of a scene from the days of the British Raj.
Jim Wickwire was conscious of the power he wielded over these people. “I stood on a rock looking at this sea of humanity,” he said, “playing the role of god. I would look out over the crowd, pick out a guy who looked strong, and point at him. The two or three people next to him would think they were the one being singled out until I made the right gestures to indicate the guy I meant. Then he would walk over to the medical line, ebullient, while the others stood there in the heat, dejected. I didn’t particularly like the job, but there was no other way of doing it.”
Wick didn’t need to feel guilty; our method of handling the porters was enlightened empathy compared with early expeditions visiting the Karakoram. On the first attempt to climb K2, in 1902, all porters were carefully watched during the day’s march and, at evening, any stragglers or troublemakers were publicly whipped. Saleem, our liaison officer, was much harder on the porters than any of us, knocking them around with a big stick with more force than we used. At first I thought Saleem had a superior and colonial attitude. Later I discovered that he had a deep-hearted regard for their welfare and felt a genuine camaraderie with the porters. Hitting them was simply the way both sides expected porters to be handled. With any less force, there would be undisciplined chaos.
By the time we had selected about two hundred men, the others hoping for jobs became restless, realizing their chances were dimming. It became more difficult to control them. Sometimes John and I had to hold our staffs across five or six, pushing for all we were worth. Eventually, we hired the number of men we needed and the others began to wander off, walking back god knows how far to their villages. Others lingered, hoping for a miracle.
Finally, the tractors with our equipment arrived. The next job was unloading, inventorying, and issuing loads. It was hot work in the direct noon sun, with no shade for shelter. By early afternoon, however, the job was finished. We could shoulder our own packs. We planned to hike only as far as the village of Dasso, about four miles away. The approach march was beginning.
The approach march was beginning but many of us were still no more than barely acquainted with one another. For most of us, however, there was at least one or two other people we had known before: Terry Bech had been with John Roskelley, Lou Reichardt, and Craig Anderson in 1973 on Dhaulagiri.
Lou and John had reached the summit together on that climb, and together, three years later, had made the summit of Nanda Devi, the highest mountain in India, by a very difficult unclimbed ridge. Skip Edmonds and Bill Sumner were good friends from the Seattle area and had been together on a small climbing and trekking trip to Nepal. Chris Chandler and I had been together in 1976 on Mount Everest; Rob Schaller, Jim Wickwire, Dianne Roberts, and Jim Whittaker had been, of course, together in 1975 on K2. Diana Jagersky had not been on a climbing expedition with any of the others, but she had known several of the Seattleites for a number of years. Only Cherie Bech, Terry’s wife, had the job of getting to know everyone.
One of the attractions of big expeditions is the opportunity of meeting people and being intimately close to them for months, people who, as often as not, have varied and fascinating backgrounds. The assortment on our trip was even more eclectic than usual. For one thing, it was a highly educated group: four doctors of philosophy, three doctors of medicine, and a lawyer, and everyone else with a college degree of some sort.
For several days after arriving in Pakistan we stayed in Rawalpindi and the neighboring capital, Islamabad, making last-minute preparations. We were courteously hosted by several families from the American Embassy, but were scattered around town in twos, each pair staying in a different house. It was not until we flew to Skardu that we began to know one another.
On that flight, we followed the Indus up through the Himalayan foothills, leaving behind the humid heat of the Punjab, flying north until the great river made its turn east toward Tibet, bending around the immense massif of Nanga Parbat, 26,660 feet above sea level. At last we were in the mountains. Our little Fokker F-27 flew at an altitude well below Nanga Parbat’s summit, and from the windows we saw at horizon-level glaciers spilling from the flanks of the mountain. Smaller summits passed under our wing, breathlessly close. After so many months and years of writing letters to obtain government permits, of raising support and money, of purchasing food and seeking donations of equipment, of packing and shipping, of planning strategies on how best to place and supply camps, of daydreaming about summits, it was an exciting moment.
The Last Step Page 3
