The Last Step

by Rick Ridgeway

  The four of us had a pleasant stop, munching, watching the porters hike by, and gazing across the valley at the incomparable granite spires rising everywhere. Jim and Wick got up and resumed hiking, and Dianne and I walked on by ourselves. It was a good chance for me to chat with her and learn more about her background, how she became a photographer and how she met Jim. All I really knew was that she had been born and raised in Calgary, Canada, and had been married to Jim about six years.

  “After college I left home, worked in Toronto awhile in research psychology, saved all my money, got interested in photography, vagabonded to Europe. I couldn’t yet support myself with photography, so I got a job with the Canadian National Park Service. That’s when I met Jim. He was on a fact-finding tour—he is on a board that advises the Secretary of the Interior on policy for national parks—and they were visiting some of the western Canadian parks. I was in charge of showing them around. I kind of expected a group of eighty-year-old fuddy-duddies, but boy, was I surprised. It was a great electric love-at-first-sight romance. He went back to the States and I started getting these huge, funeral bouquets of flowers sent to my office. Then we started meeting in various halfway spots like Vancouver, until the travel tickets and phone bills got too high so we got married.

  “I had no idea, at the time, that a few years later, I would be on two major expeditions to try and climb the second highest mountain in the world. I had grown up in Calgary, I had hiked in the Rockies all my life, and done a little skiing, but I didn’t know anything about technical climbing.”

  “Didn’t you have any premonitions this kind of thing might happen,” I asked, “when you married Jim?”

  “No, I think if I thought about the Himalaya at all, it was maybe as a neat place to go hiking. But I did have a premonition about one thing—it wasn’t just a premonition, more a certain knowledge—that whatever happened, life with Jim would never be boring.”

  I did know that Dianne had had some problem keeping her own last name after she was married.

  “It was U.S. Immigration. I told them I wanted to keep my own last name, but they kept sending resident alien ‘green cards’ made out to Dianne Whittaker. Finally, I ranted and raved enough that their lawyers decided if it did go to court, they would lose. So one day I received an envelope in the mail and inside, with no accompanying note or letter, was a green card made out to Dianne Roberts.”

  From reading accounts of the ’75 K2 expedition, I also knew Dianne had had some trouble being the only woman on that trip. She had wanted to be considered one of the team, and she had worked as hard as anyone during the preparation. Her problems were not only the result of being a woman in what is mostly a man’s sport, however. She also was a novice climber, and many of the members of that expedition resented her presence because they knew the only reason she was there was that she was Jim’s wife.

  “I think if we could have communicated better, things wouldn’t have fallen apart as they did,” she said. “Things got passed around among the climbers, but no one came directly to me. I just hope none of that happens this time.”

  Dianne still had not had much climbing experience by the time of the ’78 expedition, but she nevertheless hoped to climb high on K2. As on the ’75 trip, she had again shouldered much of the work during the preparation, and she felt she had earned her place. She saw her role of photographer as a serious one, and she had commitments to Nikon to produce the best set of expedition photographs possible. In order to get good photographs, she had to be where the action was, and that meant climbing. Still, a number of the team were not so sure she should go high on the mountain, and even as late as the final stage of the approach march, it was not clear what would be Dianne’s exact role.

  “I just hope that if people have any feelings about what I’m doing one way or the other, they speak up in front of me so we can clear them up.”

  We caught a glimpse of Jim and Wick ahead, and Dianne sped up to catch them. I continued to walk alone up the glacier. I could hear the sounds of my steps, and of rocks falling here and there off the debris-covered ice as the glacier imperceptibly quivered and moved another fraction of an inch, down toward the desert.

  Urdukas is a grassy hillside oasis, greened by several small springs percolating through the gravelly soil. Small bushes grow around the springwater, and rosy finches hop in the branches and sing songs. The grass is colored by small purple flowers and some yellow ones that look like buttercups; white butterflies—the kind common in summer fields back home—visit the flowers. Below this oasis, the gray Baltoro Glacier fills the valley floor like a turbulent sea, frozen in geological time. Across the glacier, behind the opposite hillside, are two groups of twenty-thousand-foot granite peaks, the Baltoro Cathedrals and Lobsang Towers, that rise like a painted backdrop for a theatrical stage. One of these spires is a perfect triangle, with a rock face as smooth as sheet metal. Down the valley is Paiju, and across, the Trango Towers. Urdukas, the oasis, is the last place—as one continues up the Baltoro—of green, living things; realizing this, it was important for us to savor the time spent there. It would be months before we returned.

  The grass slopes were peppered with large, protruding granite boulders, and under leaning walls and in small caves and holes some of the porters prepared shelters while others ranged the slopes, hunting for scarce firewood. With more and more expeditions each year visiting this place, firewood was difficult to find. Although we provided dozens of kerosene-burning stoves, they would be used primarily for brewing tea in the upper zones of no wood. Now, the porters needed fires to cook hundreds of chapatties to be eaten during the remaining four days’ march to Base Camp. It was for this time to cook that they required a rest day at Urdukas, and none of us objected. It would be hard to imagine a more dramatic rest station.

  While the scenery was incomparable, there were two drawbacks: flies and fierce heat. To protect against both, we erected two big tents of the sort used for car camping. We spent the hottest part of the afternoon inside with the covers over the large mosquito-netted windows furled and trussed to allow entry of the slightest breeze that might cool the inside, and also to expose the view across the valley. As the sun lowered to the valley’s rim, horizontal lines of clouds were drawn like Venetian blinds over Paiju Peak, and the eerie light cast heraldic rays across the walls of the Trango Towers.

  When the air cooled and the flies went to rest, we ventured out; while Diana Jagersky prepared dinner, Chris Chandler and Cherie Bech held clinic for the porters. Each evening, the doctors (Bob Schaller most often took this responsibility) held a clinic and, each evening, long lines of porters queued up to seek treatment. Probably the majority of the complaints were legitimate—bronchial ailments, some tuberculosis, worms, trachoma and conjunctivitis, giardia and shigella—but a percentage of them were trivial, and Bob had a jar of Good and Plenty placebos, in addition to the ubiquitous aspirin, which he handed out. Cherie Bech had another technique for the dozens of porters who complained of minor blisters: when a porter would point to a sore spot on his foot, Cherie would take off her own shoe and point at a raw spot the size of a half dollar. Usually, the porter would stare at her wound, perplexed, and walk away.

  The doctors realized that for most of the many porters who had legitimate complaints, there was little they could do. Unless the porters had worms, which could be treated with a single administration of medicine, it was impossible to follow up a multi-day medication program. The doctors knew what would happen if a porter was given a vial of pills and told to take one four times a day for a week: besides the danger of his taking them all at once, the pills were often sold or traded. After each clinic, there was brisk barter in aspirin and Good and Plentys. The Good and Plentys had more value than aspirin because they were not only bigger, but more brightly colored.

  The next day the main task, before the heat of the day drove us to the tents or under recesses behind the large boulders, was to dismiss fifty porters who had eaten themselves out of a job. E
ach day the main body of porters consumed many loads of food—mostly ground wheat flour called atta—and each day we sent that number of porters back home. Now the porters were cooking up most of the remaining flour in preparation for the remaining miles to Base Camp. Our army of load carriers dwindled each day.

  Jim Whittaker and Jim Wickwire spent most of the morning in the tent counting rupees. Then the money was stacked in separate piles, each man was paid, and with a handshake and thank you, he was sent on his way. There was still the problem of how the porters would cross the swollen Dumordo River. After calculating how long it would take, and consequently how much it would cost, to send the porters up to the head of the valley to detour down the far side, we decided it would be cheaper to send a team of porters to rerig the rope crossing, then pay two of them to guard the bridge (or certainly someone would steal the ropes) for the duration of the expedition, so our mail runners could make regular trips between Base Camp and Skardu.

  With the fifty porters paid there was little to do but find shade and spend the day reading, writing, or chatting. Terry and Cherie Bech had rigged a shade awning by snapping together two rain ponchos, supporting them on ski poles. The two Bechs, Bill Sumner, Chris Chandler, and I lounged on the grass, spending several hours swapping stories and getting to know one another better. It was the first chance I had had to spend any time talking to the Bechs.

  Cherie Bech was thirty-three years old, of medium height and lean build, and wore her straight, light brown hair shoulder-length. Her face was sharp-featured, skin drawn tight over high cheekbones, mouth wide and capable of changing quickly from an open sensual smile to a pursed-lipped seriousness. From her ears dangled ornate gold earrings she had purchased in the Skardu bazaar. She often used strong, unabashed language, and she thought of herself as a decisive, strong woman. Ambitious, a good climber, and a good nurse, she was the mother of two children, one of whom was named Annapurna—her namesake not only the famous mountain in Nepal, but also the Nepalese midwife who had delivered her. Mountains were a big part of Cherie’s life, and she very much wanted to be the first woman to climb K2.

  Cherie was born in Australia at the end of World War II, went to nursing school in Sydney, and at age twenty-one started climbing in Australia’s Blue Mountains. Soon she graduated to the New Zealand Alps; after a two-year apprenticeship, she started thinking about the Himalaya, packed her rucksack, and vagabonded to Kathmandu. That was where she met Terry Bech, and after a three-week romance, they were married.

  At that time, 1971, Terry had already been in Nepal for six years, working first as a Peace Corps volunteer then, supported by a Ford Foundation grant, undertaking a survey of the music of the various ethnic groups of Nepal. He was considered one of the world’s authorities on Nepalese ethnomusicology. Terry was an unusual-looking man. He was thirty-nine years old, had a broad, balding forehead, dark, wispy hair, black eyebrows, and dark, intense eyes. His high forehead gave him a cerebral look, and with his habit of staring at you, eyes wide when he talked to you, he had an aura of a scientist deep in intellectual thought or, perhaps, a slightly wild musician with symphonies no one else could hear playing in his head. Terry was, in fact, a professional violist and made his living playing in orchestras.

  Terry grew up in Spokane, Washington, and was introduced to mountaineering in the Cascades. He had been on several treks over high passes, had climbed some smaller peaks during his years in Nepal, and had attempted Dhaulagiri in 1969. He was invited on another attempt of Dhaulagiri—the same expedition that John Roskelley, Lou Reichardt, and Craig Anderson were on—in the spring of 1973. Since Terry was in Nepal, the expedition asked him to reconnoiter the mountain, so in 1972 he and Cherie set out with six hundred pounds of gear and a few Sherpas to climb as high as they could on the flanks of Dhaulagiri. I had heard parts of the story of this “reconnaissance” from other climbers, but sitting under the awning in Urdukas, I was anxious to hear the details firsthand. They both related the story:

  “We only had a trekking permit to make a reconnaissance of the peak,” Cherie began. “But right off we decided we would go as high as we could, and see—who knows?—if we could get to the top. But then the porters quit on us, leaving us stranded at about eleven thousand feet with six hundred pounds of supplies. So we began the long process of hauling everything to Base Camp. We were carrying huge loads, and it took almost three weeks just to get everything ferried to Base Camp.”

  “Then the work really began,” Terry continued. “We not only had to scout the route to each new camp, but we had to haul all the supplies too—all with just the two of us. We carried huge loads—some up to a hundred pounds—but we kept at it. Finally, after about seven weeks, we had a tent at the high camp, and a few supplies in it, and we thought we just might have a chance of making the summit. But before we could try, a fierce storm hit us, and without enough supplies up high to wait it out, we had to abandon the climb.”

  “But we did reach a high point of over twenty-four thousand feet,” Cherie added. “Which isn’t bad for just the two of us with no Sherpa support.”

  “And what was really incredible,” Terry said, glancing at Cherie with a look that suggested both pride and respect, “was that Cherie had been carrying a double load the whole time. She was five and a half months pregnant.”

  Despite Cherie’s accomplishment on Dhaulagiri, it was not enough to gain her a position on the bigger American expedition the following year, so she bid Terry good luck as he left Kathmandu for the long approach trek and the Kali Gandaki Valley between Annapurna and Dhaulagiri. The expedition was a success—three climbers reached the summit, including one Sherpa—but Terry was not among them. A sharp ear infection forced him down from the high camp, although he worked hard to assist the two members who did reach the summit. Because there have been relatively few American expeditions to the big Himalayan peaks, and because the fraternity of high-altitude climbers in this country is small, it was no surprise that those two summit climbers, Lou Reichardt and John Roskelley, were also on our K2 team.

  Cherie and Terry had lived in Nepal for three more years before moving to Bloomington, Indiana, so Terry could complete his PhD in the University of Indiana’s Department of Tibetan Studies. It was hard for two people in love with mountains to stick it out in the corn belt. When they heard Jim Whittaker was forming a team to try K2, they drafted resumes and sent in their applications.

  Jim was looking not only for climbers with high-altitude experience, but, being interested in providing women a chance to break into the men’s world of mountain climbing, he wanted to have at least one woman as a full climbing member of the team. Dianne had been the only female on the ’75 trip, and he knew how lonely she had been for another woman to talk to. So, with Dianne’s encouragement, the Bechs were invited to join up. For the Bechs, it was to be a drastic, but welcome, contrast—from the horizontal world of Indiana to the vertical world of the Karakoram.

  In the midafternoon, four British climbers, on their way home from an unsuccessful attempt on the fabulously beautiful Gasherbrum IV, shambled into camp. They were a strong team of well-known alpinists, but they had chosen an extremely difficult route that proved too dangerous from rockfall to justify continuing the climb. The leader was Martin Boysen, famous as one of Bonington’s strongest colleagues. He had twice been on Everest, including the 1975 expedition that had successfully made that first ascent of the huge southwest face. After Tut Braithwaite and Nick Estcourt had managed to find a passage through the difficult rock band, allowing Doug Scott and Dougal Haston to push to the summit, Martin and his close friend Mick Burke set out for the high camp to make their own summit bid. They got an early start, but partway up, Boysen’s regulator malfunctioned, and he did not want to continue without oxygen. Burke went on by himself. In the afternoon, a cloud covered the summit area. Burke was never seen again. It was presumed he stepped through a cornice. His companions hoped it was on the way down—after making the first solo climb to the summit
of Everest.

  That afternoon, Jim Wickwire and Boysen walked up a hill behind camp so they could see Gasherbrum IV and Martin could point out his attempted route. They had first met in ’75, when Boysen was in the Karakoram on an attempt to climb the formidable Nameless Tower, and it was good to catch up with what each had been doing in the intervening years. This led naturally to K2, and to the tragedy on Bonington’s trip. Having been on earlier Bonington trips, Boysen had known Nick Estcourt well.

  “I heard the news first on the radio about three weeks back,” Boysen said. “They didn’t say who it was—simply that someone on the British K2 Expedition had been killed. But I knew right then who it was. Nick had been having troubles with his personal life—split up with his wife—and he’d been a bit moody and depressed and I knew it was him.”

  “But it was an avalanche,” Wick said. “It could have happened to anybody. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “He had his guard down,” Boysen said. “He shouldn’t have been on the mountain. You just don’t go on a big climb if there are any doubts.”

  Wick found interesting Boysen’s idea of a connection between Estcourt’s personal problems and his death, which ordinarily would have been considered a random accident. Maybe Estcourt was not as perceptive as he should have been; perhaps, had he been in a more positive frame of mind, he would have smelled danger before he stepped out onto that slope and broke loose that big slab. Wick was not sure there was a valid connection. But it led to further discussion of death in the mountains, and of that ever-present specter that one writer of mountaineering literature has referred to as “the background noise of climbing.”

  “The one that hit me hardest was Mick’s death on Everest,” Boysen said. With a tone of bitterness, he added, “If it hadn’t been for a faulty part in an oxygen regulator, we both would have made the summit, and Mick would still be alive.”