K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [100]
At Camp II, the men had a doleful surprise. They found some tins of jam and pemmican, rusty with age, some stoves and a little gas, and “a Logan tent carefully wrapped and sheltered beneath a tarpaulin.” These things had been left when Wiessner and Pasang Lama made their desperate retreat on July 23, 1939. It was here that those two shattered men had wrapped themselves in one tent and lain in the other through a sleepless night, as they felt their fingers and toes begin to freeze. Why they—or someone else—had wrapped the Logan tent and cached it under a tarp remains a mystery, since Wiessner never mentions doing so. Most likely, on his last effort to go up the mountain to look for survivors, on August 4, when he managed only to drag himself to Camp II, Wiessner had folded up and stashed the tent in hopes of yet another rescue effort.
Despite such minor setbacks as the route-finding snafu, the team was getting along well. “Morale excellent and no frictions in party,” Dee wrote in his diary on June 26. But his homesickness only intensified. “I miss Lee and Patti terribly,” he confessed on July 2. “No more lengthy, bigtime expeditions for me!”
In 1939, the Dartmouth boys, George Sheldon and Chappell Cranmer, had gotten homesick early on the expedition, and those base camp blues had apparently contributed to the “crump” that left them virtually useless on the mountain. What you have to admire about Dee Molenaar is that despite feeling so down only two weeks after reaching base camp, to the point of vowing never to go on another major expedition (in fact, he would not), on K2, out of commitment to his teammates, he continued to pull every bit of his share of the weight, and to care as much as anyone about trying to get at least two men to the summit. Only a few days after his disconsolate birthday diary entry, Dee led a perilous and poorly protected leftward traverse, much to the admiration of his teammates, who nicknamed it “Molenaar’s Madness.”
On July 7, the climbers reached the site of the dangerous 1938 Camp III, at 20,700 feet. Intending to use the spot only as a supply depot, as Wiessner wisely had, the climbers were startled when Bates, poking around a corner, found a nook sheltered from falling rocks by an overhanging cliff. It was a major effort to excavate two narrow tent platforms there, but when the men were done, they had a safe and serviceable Camp III. (The brunt of the excavating was done by one of the Hunzas, Hidayat, in “a furious burst of construction.” Like the Sherpa, the Hunzas often perform the most backbreaking work on expeditions, and often the “sahibs” are only too willing to sit back and watch them slave away. And sometimes, at the end of the day, the Hunzas or Sherpa are simply stronger.)
The next day, the team got more stunning news, via a radio broadcast received at base camp and relayed by walkie-talkie up the mountain. The great Austrian mountaineer Hermann Buhl had just made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth-highest mountain, which in the 1930s had cost the lives of so many Germans, Austrians, and native porters. And Buhl had reached the summit solo!
The line in Dee’s diary commenting on that achievement is fascinating, because it reflects the suspicion that initially clouded the Austrian’s bold deed. Buhl, Dee wrote, “evidently sneaked off from the rest of the party at 3 A.M.”
That was the story propagated by the team leader, Dr. Karl Herrligkoffer, who has gone down in mountaineering annals as one of the most autocratic and spiteful expedition dictators in Himalayan history. The true story, which took a long while to emerge, was that Buhl set out from the team’s high camp half an hour ahead of his teammate Otto Kempter, who was feeling weak and having trouble getting started. Buhl intended only to break trail until