The Last Step

by Rick Ridgeway

  “I would have made it, but I had to wait for Terry. He took so long.”

  She spoke with difficulty, mumbling, and the saliva again ran slightly from the corner of her blue lips.

  “The weather is so much better there.”

  “Huh?”

  “The weather. When I was a kid back home. So much better. In Australia, you know, where I’m from. Warm there, not like this.”

  “Keep going. One step. Then another. Now another.”

  “My diaphragm. Hard to breathe.”

  She continued, one slow step at a time. We were close now; I could hear Wick and John shouting, beaconing us with their flashlight—a lighthouse in the spindrift and wind. Cherie made the last steps into camp, still under her own power, and I felt admiration, even pride, witnessing one of my companions muster her last ounce of strength. Cherie stood in front of Wick and Lou’s tent, at attention like a soldier in some war movie reporting in from a hard battle, staring ahead, tears in her eyes, while I worked to untie her harness. Wick put a cup of hot tea to her lips. The harness knot was frozen and I cut the nylon webbing.

  “Don’t do that,” Cherie said. “Don’t cut it. I’ll need it in the morning.”

  “Quiet. We’ve got to get you in the tent.”

  Lou helped her in, and with her feet out the door, I removed her boots. Wick fed her tea. In the other tent, John was helping Terry into his sleeping bag and feeding him hot broth. He was shaking and very cold, but otherwise undamaged. Lou zipped together two sleeping bags and huddled next to Cherie to transfer his body heat. Wick continued to feed her tea but she couldn’t hold it down. I rummaged for an oxygen regulator, and fastening it to a bottle, I cracked the valve and looked at the gauge: 3900 psi, full pressure. We gave Cherie the end of the plastic tube from the regulator—fitting a mask on her face would have been too uncomfortable—and I adjusted the flow rate to two liters a minute. Her shaking stopped, and she seemed to relax. I had inspected her hands when she crawled in the bag, but it was difficult to tell if they were frostbitten; we would know in the morning. I returned to my tent and helped John minister to Terry.

  Terry lay in his bag, feeling better. John and I brewed tea and cocoa and rehydrated him. Their call for help had come just as we were preparing our own meal, and I knew I had to try to eat something myself, and drink more liquid, if I was to keep strength for the grueling climb in the morning to Camp VI. It’s so slow melting snow to water, then heating it, at high altitude. It takes hours. The stove flame turns weak in the thin oxygen; the cold ambient temperature slows heating.

  From the neighboring tent Wick told us Cherie was recovering amazingly well. She had apparently suffered no frostbite, and the oxygen was like a magical, revitalizing potion. Wick reported Cherie was even saying she would be strong enough in the morning to carry to Camp VI.

  I thought, That’s just the attitude that’s going to get her in serious trouble. She was lucky this time.

  I finished forcing down chunks of freeze-dried beef stew. Clops of the mixture were still unhydrated; there was no time to even cook the stuff, and we just poured boiling water on it—water that was boiling at a much lower temperature because of reduced atmospheric pressure—and ate the results. I washed it down with a welcome mug of tea, then crawled in my bag.

  I thought, We’ll need an early start. We should wake up about four-thirty. I felt so tired. I asked John the time. “Twelve-fifteen,” he said. A long, long day.

  SEPTEMBER 3. 3:30 a.m. I awoke from a foggy dream, my head aching. I was used to headaches; at Camp IV they weren’t too bad, but at Camp V and above it was something you simply lived with. At that altitude, at night, your body’s involuntary rate of breathing is insufficient to keep an adequate oxygen supply, and you awake continually short of breath, claustrophobic. In the most extreme cases you awake with panic, as if drowning, and you start breathing so fast you fatigue, slowing down, thereby becoming hypoxic, and having to again start breathing fast, starting a wicked cycle medically known as Cheyne-Stokes breathing. Even if you don’t Cheyne-Stokes, at high altitude you almost always awake with a headache, and often nausea.

  I had to pee. But I didn’t want to crawl out of my bag. I was so warm and secure, comforted in the loft of goose down. For a few minutes I lay quiet, breathing regularly and feeling the increased oxygen flow begin to ease my headache. My slight nausea was also disappearing, and I rummaged along the side of my sleeping bag for my water bottle. To ensure an early start we had melted enough water before going to sleep to fill our bottles—two liters to each person—and then we laid them next to our bags where sufficient heat would prevent freezing. I took a swig and knew I had no choice then but to pee. But I put it off, wondering if somehow I could hold out another hour until I had to get up anyway to help prepare breakfast.

  Suddenly I was swept again with that nauseated feeling; something was wrong, very wrong. I panicked for a second, and felt a tight grip in my stomach. I was on one side of the tent, John was on the other side, Terry in the middle. Both of them seemed to be breathing irregularly, which was normal at this altitude, and I didn’t sense any problem. But something was wrong. I sat up and zipped open the window. Before I looked out, I knew what it was. I thought, No, God, not now. It can’t be. Not this late, not after all we’ve been through, not this close to the end.

  But it was. They were there again, in the black, starless predawn, those big, cold snowflakes silently drifting down.

  It is too bad we couldn’t somehow have gone up in a hot air balloon to about forty thousand feet, where we could have seen the entire region. All across the great Karakoram clouds that had gathered during the night—condensed from vapor still present from the last storm—had formed over the highest peaks. There was a big one, a solitary one, over K2, just hanging there from top to bottom, and all of us climbers in that cloud had no way of knowing that over China, and the other way over Pakistan, the big high-pressure cell was still growing, and soon the clouds would melt away to an Indian summer spell of perfect weather that sometimes arrives late in the season in the Karakoram. But down on the mountain, covered by our own cloud and obscured from the world around us, we awoke that morning to profound depression; for most of us it was the lowest our morale had sunk since we had started the ascent of K2, fifty-nine days before. I noted in my journal:

  SEPTEMBER 3. Woke up early this morning with excitement and hope of moving to Camp VI. But almost unbelievably it is snowing. It is too much to take; if the walls of this tent weren’t so soft I would bash my head against them. We only need two days—just two days of reasonably good weather. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just clear enough to see where we’re going. Only two days, God.

  After all this work, all the days and weeks and months and years, we keep being pushed up and down by fickle weather. I’ve never been on a mountain with so many storms. Today is another day on our backs, staring again at checkered rip-stop walls. I spent the last hour trying to estimate how many of those eighth-inch squares are in the whole tent—anything to keep my mind off the thought.

  We only have two days of food here at Camp V. Terry and Cherie will move back to Camp IV in the morning to conserve food. There are hardly any supplies there, either.

  Will we make the top? Who knows. It’s so frustrating, so incredibly frustrating. John and I have both agreed to not go down, no matter what, until we have made every last effort to reach the top. We will eat what food remains, and if the weather doesn’t clear, we try anyway. We climb no matter what. What else is there to do?

  The bad weather was in one way welcome relief for Terry and Cherie. Although they wanted as much as any of us to move up to Camp VI, and realized as much as any of us the urgency caused by our diminished supplies, they were that morning exhausted from the previous night’s ordeal. Both of them, however, had recovered remarkably, particularly Cherie. She was again her testy self, and she insisted that as soon as the weather broke she would carry to Abruzzi VI, with Lou and Wick, and if possi
ble try for the top. If that weather break didn’t occur the next day, however, she and Terry would have to drop back to Camp IV. Although we didn’t openly voice it, the four of us on the summit team felt there was little chance Cherie would have it in her to get much above Camp VI; we all knew the climb up the snow dome into Camp V was nothing compared to the effort that would be needed to reach the summit.

  But all the speculation, the planning, the different scenarios of who climbed with whom and on what route, seemed hollow, pointless. I sank in despair, thinking it would be difficult to ever again get the desire to return to the Himalaya and try to climb one of the giants. It had been such a long dream. After the work and effort, to be turned back again by storm, without even getting a chance to push, with all our effort, toward the top. . . . I went to sleep that evening, defeated.

  SEPTEMBER 4. Direct morning sun on yellow and orange tent fabric. Biting, bitter cold, wind, thirty below zero—eighty below windchill factor?—and a sky as clear as blue ice. Excited movement in camp. Electric excitement. Freezing fingers strapping cold steel crampons to boots; flesh welding to steel. Freezing toes, nausea, headache. The gasping of people starved for oxygen, the sound of coughing, and a feeling of absolute thrill; the joy of prayers answered.

  “You got the oxygen wrench?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your regulator?”

  “Got mine. Make sure your mask is packed.”

  “I’ve got stove and cartridges. Seven-mill rope? We won’t need any more fixed line than that.”

  “All packed.”

  “Finished in the tent?”

  “Yeah. Close it. Let’s get moving. Starting to freeze.”

  “Ready. Let’s go.”

  We marched out of Camp V, John and I in the lead, Lou and Wick behind, Cherie and Terry following them. Six figures in a line punching steps down the backside of the snow dome toward the enormous summit pyramid that loomed directly before us, brilliant and glistening in the morning sun, a great rampart against which all our effort and strength would soon be pitted. I could see the route John and I would take to the summit, and rock buttress where we would place our Camp VI later that day, the big snowfield to the right of the campsite that rose up and up, getting steeper, finally ending in an ice cliff that from our estimates would be almost vertical for perhaps a hundred feet or more. Above that the angle lessened slightly, but then near the top, at 27,800 feet or so, we would have to traverse a rock band, laced with snow, that would be steep and difficult. The thrill of that challenge spread through me; the thought of climbing near-vertical ice at such extreme altitude released a rush of adrenaline that sent a warm flush through my body.

  Just ahead I could see a rock at the base of the backside of the snow dome; I estimated that would be the place our teams would split. John and I would continue straight ahead, up the ever steepening direct finish of the summit pyramid. Lou and Wick, assisted in a carry from Terry and Cherie, would begin the traverse to the Abruzzi, where they would establish their Camp VI.

  “Hold up,” Lou yelled.

  I turned around and saw that Cherie had dropped back. She had been slow leaving camp that morning and a short distance beyond the tents had been sick to her stomach. Now she could go no farther. She removed her pack and Lou, Wick, and Terry divided her load. For Cherie, it was the end of the climb. She had pushed herself as far as her body would permit. As we shouldered our packs and continued, I glanced back and saw her still standing, staring at us, not moving. She was too far to see, but I knew she was quietly crying, and I felt a great poignancy. Despite our differences, despite the arguments, Cherie had given her all until the last to help the expedition reach the summit of K2. Lou would later write of that moment:

  She realized she had reached the limit of her endurance and turned back. She had never hesitated during the expedition to carry the same loads as men nearly twice her weight, but had not recovered from becoming extremely hypothermic on the long carry to Camp V. Watching her return to Camp V after setting an Australian altitude record, we were struck by the tragic dichotomy between willpower, which would have carried her anywhere, and her body, which was made of the same weak flesh as the rest of us.

  As I reached the rock and sat down to wait for the others, I thought how the mountain had lowered our numbers to the five people then gathering in the bright Karakoram sun at 25,300 feet. The effort was in our hands. Cherie had disappeared back over the dome to await Terry’s return in Camp V, but I still held that image of her standing alone, watching us slowly walk away. She stood there, stripped of pretensions, her final dreams dissolving before her eyes, and like the rest of us, at that final hour of the expedition, naked before the mountain.

  Lou arrived and sat next to John and me. Wick was slowly coming, thirty feet away, then twenty. He had the comical look of an itinerant pot and pan salesman pulling his clanking cart. That morning the joints of the fiberglass poles of his two-person tent had frozen together, and unable to break them down, his only choice had been to partially collapse the tent and strap the unwieldy package, at least four feet by seven, across the top of his pack. Now he looked more like a dust-bowl farmer en route to California than an expert climber heading for the highest camp on K2.

  We rested together, sharing lemonade, our last union before parting ways.

  “You could still go with us,” John said to Lou and Wick. “It’s not too late.”

  But it was clear they wanted to cut left and traverse toward the Abruzzi. The wind had calmed, and it was becoming a warm, brilliant day. Lethargy spread through our bodies and we knew we had to get up and move; the longer we waited, the harder it would be. We stood, shook hands, then hugged each other. We all wondered what would be the others’ fate.

  “See you guys on top,” I said. “We’ll probably descend your route and join you in Abruzzi Six.”

  “We’ll have a big reunion party,” Wick said with his open-mouthed, determined grin. He had the buoyancy of a man whose dreams were about to be realized.

  John and I continued ahead, slowly punching steps up the continually steepening slope, mindlessly moving one foot in front of the other. Little skill was needed to trudge up the snow slope, but at over twenty-five thousand feet, with fifty or more pounds in our packs, it was very slow and hard work. I lost track of time, hypnotized, and then thought to look back and see how Lou, Wick, and Terry were doing on their traverse—maybe even make a final farewell wave. I turned around, but all I saw was tracks disappearing around a bulge in the snowfield, toward the Abruzzi Ridge.

  Twenty-six thousand feet. Deep, deep snow, accumulated from the last storm. I thought, The wind must have come from a different direction during this last storm and deposited more snow on this face than when Lou and Wick plunged their way up a week earlier. Snow above our waists, even to our shoulders.

  Talking to myself, I fell into a trance: Hard to breathe. Now only two hundred yards to go, even less, to Camp VI. John just behind me. I have fifty more feet, then it will be his turn. Take my ice ax and push in the snow, pack the snow, push it down with the shaft of the ax, then lift a leg, struggle to lift it, push it into the formless soft white and push up. The leg goes down and I gain what? Six inches, maybe. Then the next foot, a little higher, maybe another six inches, and now I have to beat the snow down again with the ax shaft and then lean forward and press with my body weight, forming a channel up the steep snow slope, a swath through the snow, ready to lift my leg again, but wait. I can’t. No oxygen. I have to stop and breathe, so many times, keep breathing until that dizziness goes away and I feel enough strength to lift the next foot. O.K., keep going up until a few more inches become a few more feet become a few more yards and breathe, breathe, breathe again and again. Dizzy; no energy; must rest. Hearing things, too, distant voices.

  “John, Rick. John, Rick.”

  I looked down. John was just below me, and he too was peering down the slope, back toward the snow dome and Camp V. We could see Wick near the confluence of
our two trails, and we knew right away things had not gone well. John waved his arms, acknowledging that we could hear him.

  Wick yelled, his hoarse voice barely carrying up the slope. “Soft snow. Turned back. Cannot make Abruzzi. Will join you in morning.”

  John again waved acknowledgment, and turned and climbed to me while I rested.

  “Looks bad,” John said.

  “I had my fingers crossed they would find better conditions around the corner,” I said. “If the snow is this soft above Camp Six, we’ve had it. I’ve got enough trouble down here at twenty-six thousand feet, but at twenty-seven or twenty-eight, even without this load, I couldn’t climb fast enough to make the top.”

  “All we can do is try,” John said. “It’s up to us now.”

  “At least we’ll have Lou and Wick up here to help.”

  “Yeah, but I’m afraid of avalanche conditions. It’s bad enough here, but on that slope above Six, under the ice cliff—it looks real bad.”

  He paused, then said, “Let me take it for a while. I think I can break the rest of the way.”

  John and I had originally hoped to be able to arrive at Camp VI early enough to pitch the tent, then continue above, stomping the trail at least several hundred feet higher and perhaps even fix rope on the steepest sections to allow us the next day—with any luck—to make it all the way to the top. But the unexpected deep snow, deposited in the last storm, changed everything. Now our chances of success seemed as uncertain as ever, and the disappointment of learning of Wick and Lou’s failure to reach the Abruzzi added to our despair.

  It took another full hour to reach the site of Camp VI—the same place used by the Poles in 1976. There was no sign of their short occupation of this lonely bench of snow below the awesome rock buttress on the summit pyramid. There was also no sign of the gear Wick and Lou had cached a week earlier. We absolutely needed those supplies. Without the fuel cartridges for the stove, buried somewhere under what must have been a snow-slide off the buttress above, we could melt no snow, and without water we would be forced to abandon the summit attempt.