K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [104]
The men kept telling one another that all they needed was three consecutive clear days to give the summit their best shot. But that day a storm swept in over the Karakoram. It lasted for seven straight days. The men sat in their tents, trying to stay warm, burning their precious fuel, and eating their dwindling rations. Houston later recalled the tedium of that vigil:
Someone tightened the guy ropes on all tents. When we could melt snow, someone had strength to clean and fill the pots, and someone else took tea to those in the other tents. Bob Bates read aloud to us for hours. Dee Molenaar painted. We all wrote diaries; my own was now over 200 pages long.
On August 6, the wind grew so strong that Houston and Bell’s tent started to rip apart in the night. The two men gathered up their belongings, waited for a lull, then made a dash for the other tents. Houston threw himself into one shelter, Bell into another. This meant that two of the team’s remaining three tents, designed for two men each, had to hold three.
Day by day, the men watched their hopes for the summit slip through their fingers. And then August 7 brought the unforeseeable event that would cancel those hopes completely—and turn the expedition into a survival ordeal.
That day began with optimism, as the clouds rose, the sky grew brighter, and the wind diminished. But as Houston would later write,
We crawled from our tents and stumbled around like castaways first reaching shore. As Art Gilkey crawled out to join us, he collapsed unconscious in the snow. We rushed to him and he smiled feebly. “I’m all right, fellows; it’s just my leg, that’s all.”
His teammates half-carried Gilkey back into his tent. They undressed him so that Houston, the team doctor, could examine the leg. “I’ve had this Charley horse for a couple of days now,” Gilkey said, almost apologetically. “I thought it would be gone by now.”
Indeed, Dee’s diary for August 2, five days earlier, as the men had pushed up to Camp VIII, notes,
Craig and I roped together with Art during climb up ice slope, but Art, at lower end of rope, complained of a “Charley horse,” untied to keep from slowing us down. But he kept up with us, following the dragged end of the rope up the slope to VIII.
Houston knew at once that Gilkey’s ailment was no Charley horse. The man’s left ankle was red and swollen. “The diagnosis was all too clear,” Houston recalled. “Art had developed thrombophlebitis.”
That diagnosis was deeply puzzling to the experienced doctor. Blood clots had formed in Gilkey’s left calf. In the best of circumstances, he might lose his leg. But the far greater danger was that as Art moved around, the clots could break off, migrate to the lungs, and cause a fatal embolism, or blockage of a blood vessel. After wrapping Gilkey’s leg in Ace bandages and trying to “reassure” him, Houston went from tent to tent to deliver the bad news. “I can’t tell you what caused it,” he told his teammates. “It’s a disease which usually hits older people, or surgical patients. I have never heard of it in healthy young mountaineers.”
Worse luck could hardly have struck the team. Thrombophlebitis is so rare among climbers, I’ve never seen a case of it on any of my thirty expeditions to 8,000ers. But since Gilkey, we all know that the threat exists. Long periods of inactivity when you’re stormbound in a tent can cause the blood in your legs to clot. And at altitude, the inevitable dehydration thickens your blood. It’s common practice nowadays on 8,000ers to take an aspirin a day to keep your blood thin and, when you’re stuck in a tent during a long storm, to periodically get your legs moving to improve circulation. Houston’s teammates wanted to believe that Gilkey might simply be out of action for a few days. Bob Bates asked his best friend, “How soon will he get better, Charlie?” Unwilling to burden them with his darkest thoughts,