K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [1]
Like 2008’s climbers, Scott, Charley, and I had had to bide our time for interminable weeks before we finally got a crack at the summit. Not only storms but all kinds of logistical snafus and interpersonal conflicts had delayed our final assault again and again. It was not until fifty-seven days after arriving at base camp that we finally set out for the top. On the other hand, on that August day in 1992, the three of us had had the Bottleneck to ourselves. And fixing ropes up the couloir was not part of our plan.
In No Shortcuts to the Top, the memoir I wrote about climbing the world’s fourteen highest peaks, I devoted a full chapter to my K2 expedition. Even after K2, it took me several years before I began to consider that it might be possible for me to reach the summit of all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks. For one thing, I didn’t think there was any way that I could ever afford to go on so many expeditions. For another, climbing all fourteen 8,000ers seemed far too ambitious a goal. The first person to accomplish that feat had been the great Tyrolean mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who knocked off his fourteenth in 1986. And Messner was like a god to me.
Yet with K2, I became the first American to climb the world’s three highest mountains. The outdoor magazines ran a few short profiles about me. One of them was titled “Ed Who?” Even after those pieces appeared, I was still relatively unknown to the general public, but with the boost in confidence they gave me, I finally got up the nerve to start approaching potential sponsors.
K2 was a huge turning point in my life. Yes, it brought me my first modest taste of what you might call “mountaineering celebrity.” But far more important than any faint whiff of fame were the lessons K2 taught me.
In the aftermath of 2008’s disaster, all kinds of armchair “experts” delivered their scathing critiques. Nonclimbers clogging the online chat rooms, in response to sensational newspaper articles, took a macabre delight in the tragedy. This was Everest 1996 all over again, they seemed to think—the melodrama of clueless dilettantes who had no business on the mountain buying their way into a catastrophe at the cost of their own lives, as well as the lives of professional guides entrusted with caring for them. (Hundreds of readers of Jon Krakauer’s bestseller Into Thin Air reduced his complicated narrative to that simplistic morality play.) After the August 2008 tragedy, Messner himself sounded off in this vein, decrying the “K2 package deals” that he assumed had lured novices to the mountain and concluding, “Something like this is just pure stupidity.”
Messner was not the only famous mountaineer to criticize the victims of the 2008 disaster. The temptation to second-guess those luckless climbers’ decisions was all but irresistible. Newspapers, magazines, and radio and TV shows called me for my commentary. I was already beginning to think that what had happened on K2 on August 1 was far more complicated than the first tabloid and Internet versions of the story. It would take several weeks for more detailed accounts to trickle down from the slopes of the mountain and find their way to responsible media outlets. And I was not about to cast facile aspersions on climbers who had died on the mountain, or had barely survived it.
In 1992, K2 had not only proved to be a turning point in my life—it had been the scene of what I still regard as the greatest mistake I ever made as a mountaineer. The most important lesson I learned from that beautiful and dangerous peak was a blunt one: Don’t ever do that again, if you want to stay alive. Listen to your instincts, and follow them.
Recently, I reread my diary from the K2 trip. I was struck by how different it seemed from the account I had written in No Shortcuts. Events and relationships that seemed really important when they were happening barely made it into the chapter I wrote thirteen years