K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [106]
The storm raged on on August 10, but Houston demanded that the men begin the rescue effort that day. “What? Move in this storm?” someone said.
“We’ve got to,” Houston answered. “He’ll soon be dead if we don’t get him down.”
On August 7, after the abortive first attempt to evacuate Gilkey, Schoening, and Craig had gone back out to scout for an alternative route down, one that might avoid the avalanche-prone slopes of the team’s ascent route. They returned with the news that a steep rock rib just to the west might serve that purpose. It would take the team across much more difficult ground, but it looked to be safe from avalanches.
On August 10, the men packed up for what Bates would later describe as “the most dangerous day’s work of [each man’s] lifetime.” Gilkey was wrapped in a sleeping bag, with his feet in a rucksack. This makeshift litter was cradled by a network of ropes. Four men, each tending a separate rope—one man above, one below, one on either side—would try to pull and steer the immobile victim down the dangerous ground.
At regular intervals, his teammates knelt close to Gilkey’s face to ask him how it was going. “I’m fine,” he answered each time, managing a wan smile. “Just fine.”
Schoening and Molenaar went ahead to scout the route—a perilous business, in the blinding storm. For able-bodied men to descend in such conditions would have been bad enough. With the burden of their helpless invalid, the team faced an almost impossible struggle. Bates remembered that day in K2: The Savage Mountain:
The wind and cold seeped insidiously through our layers of warm clothing so that by the end of the third hour none of us had feeling in his toes any longer, and grotesque icicles hung from our eyebrows, beards, and mustaches. Goggles froze over and we continually raised them on our foreheads in order to see how to handle the rope. Moving the sick man was frightfully slow.
After hours of grim effort, however, the men had lowered Gilkey to the edge of the rock rib, at about 24,500 feet. Meanwhile, Schoening and Molenaar had located the shallow platform in the steep slope that had served as a dubious Camp VII. Only an easterly traverse of a mere 450 feet separated Gilkey from that campsite. But to haul him horizontally across the icy slope loomed as the toughest maneuver yet.
Shortly before, Craig had been engulfed in a small windslab avalanche and had just managed to keep his purchase. Now he was so exhausted that he could barely tighten his crampon straps, so Molenaar belayed him over to the campsite. There Craig rested for a while before starting to enlarge the tent platforms with his ice ax. Molenaar returned to Gilkey and tied in with a short hank of rope to the invalid’s waist loop, hoping to help out in the delicate job of hauling the litter sideways across the slope.
The men were strung out across the dangerously steep terrain in atrocious conditions. Coming last, Schoening had plunged his ax in to the hilt behind a small boulder, using it as an anchor as he looped the rope around the upper shaft and slowly fed it out to lower Gilkey. Bell and Streather were roped together on one rope, Houston and Bates on another. Molenaar stood beside Gilkey’s litter, tied in to it close.
As I’ve often commented, when climbers go to the rescue of someone else, that’s when they’re most likely to get in trouble themselves. They take risks they wouldn’t normally allow themselves, and urgency and adrenaline drive them to desperate efforts. On K2 in 1992, Scott and I got caught in the avalanche that nearly cost us our lives only because we thought we had to do everything we could to help Thor Kieser and the played-out Chantal Mauduit get down. We’d have never been in that place in those conditions if we had been simply climbing from Camp III to Camp IV. And the