The Last Step

by Rick Ridgeway

  While Chris stretched out the rope I hammered in the pickets—aluminum stakes driven in snow—and anchored them. The porters would use the rope as a handline. Then I quickly cut a few steps. I could see the porters only two hundred yards away; they had stopped, presumably to wait until we finished rigging. In a few minutes, one of the sirdars came ahead to see how we were doing. I told him to go back and tell the porters to start up—we were ready. I tied a few more knots, then headed back to help guide the porters through the seracs while Chris and Honar Baig finished making last-minute adjustments to the handline.

  I wound my way back down among the ice blocks. Despite the bad weather, things were going like clockwork. If we could get those loads to Advance Base today, we could be climbing on our ridge in five days. It was too good to be true. I turned the last corner, around the ice block, and stopped. Below me were our boxes, all 125 of them. And not one porter. In the distance, I spotted long lines of them marching back toward Base Camp. They had not waited for us to finish the handlines.

  I sat down on the boxes to wait for Chris and Honar Baig. I could not blame the porters; it was cold and sleeting, they did not have proper clothing, and they were no doubt apprehensive about going higher on the glacier. At least, I thought, they had got the boxes a few miles beyond Base. Still, it would be an enormous job to carry them the remaining distance to Advance Base. We would just have to grin and bear it—an added week of hard work.

  We arrived back to Base amid a bleak drizzle of rain and slush. Most of the team had spent the day sorting gear, and the news of our failure to get the loads to Advance Base was taken with equanimity. Wick, Bill, and Craig had fared better at the British Camp. They had not located a great deal of porter food, but they had managed to bring thirty pounds of dahl (dried peas) and some rice, tea, sugar, and biscuits, along with twelve oxygen bottles from the British supply. Best of all, they had located the oxygen cached in 1975, and to their surprise, most of the bottles were still full pressure, registering between 3700 and 3900 psi. They had been afraid the bottles would be frozen in hard ice, but they found them stacked neatly, clean of snow, and in excellent condition.

  The next morning we awoke early to begin the long job of ferrying loads to Advance Base. The sky was slate gray. Diana made breakfast, and as we sat around drinking tea, Saleem came over to tell us that nearly a hundred porters had agreed to stay that morning to carry for three hours up the glacier before heading home. That would leave them enough time to return to Concordia that day—and us enough time to get to Advance Base. It was incredible luck. We all felt a warm thanks for these people who were going out of their way to help.

  Chris said he was tired and wanted to take a rest day, so John Roskelley, Jim Wickwire, and I raced ahead to finish putting in the route to Advance Base. Above the seracs and the ropes we had placed the previous day, there was easy walking on the rock moraine fringing the glacier. We found the campsite and in a few minutes saw Jim Whittaker approaching. Following Jim, in a long line, were all the porters.

  The campsite was filled with cheering and backslapping. Jim opened a couple of food boxes, passing out cookies and candy to the porters. They all had big, toothy smiles: for them the job was finished and they would soon begin the trek home, taking with them all our blessings.

  Back in Base Camp the porters packed their few belongings and prepared to leave. But the runner had not yet arrived from Skardu with the money. We managed to establish radio contact with Skardu and learned the runner’s departure had been delayed; he would not arrive for another two or three days. There was no choice but to send someone with the porters to pay them when the runner was intercepted. Jim felt that as expedition leader it was his responsibility to go, and Terry volunteered to accompany him. It was an unenviable task—they would not only leave the climb at its beginning, but also lose valuable acclimatization at the lower elevations.

  Before Jim, Terry, and the porters left, Saleem had to make a farewell speech. From the top of a rock he told the porters what a terrific job they had done, and that the Americans, the Pakistanis, and Allah were proud of them. It was an emotional moment seeing them go, and to express our appreciation, Jim climbed the rock next to Saleem to thank the porters on behalf of our team.

  Jim addressed the porters, who stood in a large semicircle before the rock, in a strong booming voice: “I want everyone here to know, that carried up to our American Advance Base Camp, you have done something you can be very proud of.” Jim paused while Saleem translated. “It will go down in history that you have done this thing. Your sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters, shall know what you have done.” Again Saleem translated, and a murmur of approval passed through the crowd. “Our expedition is very proud of you!”

  A great cheer arose from the porters, and someone yelled, “Islam!”

  The crowd thundered back, “Zinabad!” (long live).

  “Saleem Sahib!”

  And the crowd roared, “Zinabad!”

  “Leader Sahib!” (referring to Jim).

  Again, “Zinabad!”

  The cheering continued, and over the noise Jim yelled the finish to his speech: “From this day forward until the end of time, it will be known what you have done, and we thank you!” Saleem translated, to thunderous applause. The rest of us, who had been listening from the sidelines, went to shake hands with the porters. It was a farewell with much goodwill on both sides.

  Once they had left, Base Camp suddenly had a quiet, almost lonely air. But our spirits were high. Diana Jagersky was busy cooking dinner—freezedried porkchops, mushroom gravy, and green beans, with cheesecake for dessert. Bill Sumner helped Saleem fine-tune the single-sideband radio with which Saleem would make daily calls to Skardu while we were high on the mountain. Wick listened to a Beethoven symphony on the cassette machine and wrote in his voluminous journal. The rest of us read, wrote, or simply sat under the awning erected above the kitchen area, drinking tea and eating biscuits.

  Everyone was happy with the progress of the expedition; we had done remarkably well in only two weeks. Everyone except Rob, who suffered from a bronchial infection, was more or less healthy. Almost always, on expeditions to remote areas, a good part of the team gets knocked out for at least a few days from viruses, bronchial infections, or dysentery. A few of us had sore throats, coughs, and hoarse voices, and some decided to rest for a day or two to prevent these from developing into more serious problems, but for a group of Westerners into their third week in Central Asia, we were amazingly healthy.

  Everyone was also getting along well. The only flare-up of tempers had been the jeep incident in Skardu, which Jim seemed to have forgotten entirely. Most of us had come to realize that his show of anger had been, for the most part, to save face with Saleem. We were about to begin the climb and it seemed that each of us was still committed to the goal we had set almost a year before in Seattle: to get somebody to the top of K2.

  We stayed up a little later than usual that night, joking, laughing, reading, and writing. Wick noted in his journal that there was a marked difference between the ’75 trip and the ’78 expedition at this stage of the climb. He wrote how much better everyone seemed to be getting along, and how much more resolved they were to make the expedition a success. For Wick, personally, it was the beginning of the final act in a drama he had been living and dreaming for six years: to climb K2. That evening he wrote:

  I am absolutely convinced that I am better fit at this stage of the expedition than I was in ’75. And today I have had a strong feeling of certainty that this time we will be successful—stronger than at any time since the ’75 failure, and I’ve had a stronger feeling of certainty than any time before that I will get to the top.

  | 4 |

  THE CRYSTAL BALL

  JULY 11. LOU REICHARDT PROBED THE SNOW with his ski pole, like a basset hound sniffing something suspicious.

  “I think there may be a crevasse here,” he said, turning to us while continuing to test the snow with his
pole. “I’m going to move up a few yards. It looks like a better crossing.”

  From my point of view fifty feet behind Lou, it looked as if there were nothing in front of him but solid glacial snow. Crevasses are like that; wind and new snow can keep them hidden. The deep cracks in the glacier will continue to widen and grow, and so will the trapdoor lids that cover them. Sometimes it is almost impossible to tell there is a hundred-foot-deep pit under what looks like perfectly stable snow—until you try to cross it. Then your body weight breaks through the cover, and in you go.

  Lou moved up fifty feet, paralleling what he suspected was a hidden crevasse, until he thought he was at a place where the fissure would be narrow. I jammed my ice ax into the snow and belayed the rope around it and over my boot top while Lou crawled across. If he did go through, I could quickly hold the rope over my boot top and stop his fall.

  John Roskelley, leading another rope team, saw the area Lou was trying to avoid, and he thought there would be a better crossing in the opposite direction.

  “I’m going down this way,” he called over, and started probing while Craig Anderson belayed his rope.

  Lou safely reached the other side; I took the rope off belay and started across myself. I reached the suspected crevasse. It was possible to tell there might be a hole below the snow only by carefully studying the surface—there was a slight difference in the texture. I began to cross, and that was when I made my mistake. Lou’s track made a wide detour to avoid what he sensed was the most dangerous spot; instead of following, I cut the corner. If I had had a vantage from down in the deep pit, I would have seen the snow bridge was much thinner where I was about to step.

  Skip said I looked like a cartoon roadrunner. The snow all around me gave away, and I stood there for a split second suspended over a black void, with a dumb look on my face. Then, pfft! I was gone.

  It happened too fast to remember falling. One moment I was on the Godwin-Austen Glacier, beneath the enormous east face of K2, hiking up to establish Camp I at the base of the northeast ridge. The next moment I was hanging from a rope, ten feet down in an ice pit. Fortunately I hadn’t fallen far. Skip had kept the rope tight as I crossed and I had fallen only a few feet before the slack was taken up, stopping me. I cursed my own stupidity, then prepared to get myself out. I took out two jumars—special clamps with a cam device that allows them to slide up a rope but locks in place when the pull is downward. With foot loops attached to the jumars, you can easily climb up even a free-hanging rope. My heavy pack was a hindrance so I took it off, tying it to the end of the rope. I could pull it up later.

  Before starting up I looked around inside the crevasse. It dropped away below me into blackness. Above, through the trapdoor hole I created when I fell in, light illuminated the surrounding blue-white ice. Some distance along the crevasse I saw another hole. It looked like a dark room with a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Then I took a second look. At the bottom of the cone of light was John Roskelley, hanging upside down from his rope about thirty feet deep in the crevasse.

  Diana Jagersky said it had looked like slapstick comedy. Both John and I were crossing the crevasse simultaneously, and at the same instant, both of us fell in. “One second you were both there,” she said. “And the next there were just two holes with ropes disappearing in them. It really cracked me up.”

  I saw John struggling to right himself against the weight of his pack, and my first concern was that he might be injured.

  “John!” I yelled. He looked around, bewildered. “Hey, over here. It’s me, Rick. You O.K.?”

  He glanced over and spotted me, about a hundred feet away. I could see he was trying to put the pieces together.

  In a second he yelled back, “Yeah, I’m O.K. You O.K.?”

  “Fine. I’m getting ready to jumar out. This has got to be a first. Two in a crevasse at the same time.”

  John struggled to get himself upright while I worked my way up. Just then Chris popped his head over the lip. I was about five feet below him.

  “Oh, there you are,” he said. “I expected to look over and see you fifty feet down or something.”

  He helped me over the edge, then John. Both John and I were chagrined. We were supposed to know better how to detect crevasses and were lucky we had not been injured. We hauled our packs up and continued on toward camp.

  The weather was still overcast, snowing on and off, but it showed signs of improving. The day before, July 10, we had been weathered in. Those of us who were to carry the first loads to Camp I, at the base of our ridge, had spent the day in a twenty-foot-long tent at Advance Base Camp, or “ABC,” as we had started calling it. But by this morning at eleven, the storm had started to break up, and we decided to try to get a carry to Camp I. We crossed the upper Godwin-Austen Glacier under the east face of K2, an eleven-thousand-foot wall frequently swept by avalanches calving off ice cliffs just below the summit. We tried to stay close to the center of the glacier to avoid the avalanche zone, but unfortunately the center had the most hidden crevasses. After falling in, John and I were more careful. We made the last distance to our campsite without incident.

  The place we chose for Camp I was directly at the foot of the northeast ridge. It was an ideal location, protected from rockfall and snow avalanches, and also free of hazardous crevasses. On Everest it had been necessary to place one of our camps in the middle of a glacier because there had been no other site safe from avalanches; we had had to be careful not to leave the immediate camp area, which we had probed for crevasses. On the 1976 British Everest Expedition, one of the climbers—in that same camp—stepped behind his tent and broke through a crevasse; he was dead by the time they got him out.

  We cached our loads, then took a rest and snacked on lunch before beginning the trek back to ABC. We also made sure to drink plenty of water. We were at about eighteen thousand feet, and it is very important at altitude to drink fluids. Much body water is lost through the rapid inhalation and exhalation of cold, dry air. High fluid intake also washes from the blood bicarbonates that concentrate in reaction to this heavy breathing. But everyone seemed to be adjusting to the altitude very well—nobody reported nausea or bad headaches. We had already been above sixteen thousand feet for a week, so we’d had enough time to acclimatize to that altitude.

  It was a quick hike back to ABC, moving slightly downhill along the glacier following our uphill tracks. On the way up, the surface had been softened so much by the sun that we sank up to our calves, but it was firmer now. We had less concern about hidden crevasses, too, since we had an established trail. But we realized it had been an oversight not to bring a bundle of marker wands; the next snowfall would cover our tracks and without wands to mark the way we would once again have to probe through the minefield of hidden crevasses.

  Back at ABC, we were greeted by the other team members who had come up from Base Camp. Jim Whittaker and Terry Bech were there, after making a one-day marathon trip from Urdukas to Base Camp—a distance that had taken us three days to cover on the way in. They had staggered in late at night, navigating the last section of moraine with headlamps and following the shouts of Saleem and the porters to find the camp. They had intercepted the money runner a short distance below Urdukas and had paid the porters. It was good to have them back, and from the smiles on their faces, the feeling was mutual. They had brought mail carried up from Skardu by the runner, and as soon as the letters were handed out, people wandered off to their tents to catch up on loved ones back home. On long expeditions, it seems there are two main diversions: eating and receiving mail. Of the two, mail is by far the more important.

  The only members of the team not present were Rob Schaller and Bill Sumner. Rob had not yet recovered from his bronchial infection, and Bill wanted to rest a day before coming up to higher elevations. Bill had seemed reserved over the past couple of days, but it was not apparent whether his reticence was simply his normal demeanor, or whether something else was bothering him. He had not participa
ted in any of the routefinding as far as Camp I; most of his work had been carrying loads from the abandoned British Camp, and from the ’75 oxygen dump, to Base Camp. He had spent a lot of time teaching Saleem how to use the wireless, and of all of us, he seemed to enjoy talking with Saleem, the HAPS, and the porters the most. He considered what he learned from them as valuable as the experiences climbing the mountain.

  Spirits were high that night in our big caravan tent at ABC. We had stacked equipment boxes inside along the tent walls, and they made comfortable benches to sit on while speculating on what lay ahead. Diana again cooked dinner, after having made a full carry to Camp I—a scenario that was to become a common pattern in the weeks ahead. She would get up before everyone, make breakfast, see everybody off, then pick up a load herself and carry it to an upper camp, getting back down in time to prepare dinner for the gang. She seemed indefatigable. And if that were not enough, she always smiled and laughed; no one on the trip appreciated a good joke more than she did.

  The cassette stereo blasted out an old Beatles tune—we had brought along several hundred batteries—and with a pot of tea brewing, we gathered to discuss future strategy.

  “We’ve got a terrific place for Camp One,” Lou Reichardt said. “Safe from avalanches and crevasses. I think just around the base of the ridge from the camp, we can find reasonable access to the crest of the ridge, and then on to Camp Two. I’ve studied the photos from the Polish attempt [Wick had corresponded with the Poles and obtained several pictures from their unsuccessful attempt to climb the northeast ridge in 1976]. We’ve got a choice of two snowfields to go up. The Poles chose the farther one, but I think we should at least have a look at the closer one, and then decide.”