K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [108]
With a belay from Molenaar, relying on sheer muscle memory, Houston “fairly swarmed” up the rock-and-ice slope. But when he arrived at Molenaar’s side, he repeated, “What are we doing here?”
Much of the team’s gear had been lost in the fall. The men had only a two-man tent and a smaller bivouac tent. While one man tried to hack out a platform in the steep slope, others set to work frantically pitching the tents, which the wind threatened to rip out of their hands. Earlier, Bob Craig, who had not witnessed the accident, had looked across the slope to see it swept clean of climbers. Then he heard Schoening yelling at him to get an ice ax to anchor Gilkey. Craig soloed across the traverse and planted an ax just above Gilkey’s supine body, then tied it to the rope cradle that cushioned the man’s makeshift litter. Only then could Schoening release his hands from the rope that had stopped everyone’s fall. At once he headed down toward the inadequate campsite, for his fingers, like Bell’s, had begun to freeze.
Craig told Gilkey that the team would return for him as soon as they got the tents pitched. Privately, he wondered how the men, in their newly battered state, would ever manage to drag their inert teammate across that dangerous slope. A few minutes later, Streather planted a second ax to improve Gilkey’s anchor.
While the men hacked away at their platform, they heard Gilkey, out of sight around a small rock rib, call out several times, but the wind made it impossible for them to understand what he was saying. Bates later wrote, “Gilkey sounded as if he were shouting encouragement, but the wind blurred his words, as it must have muffled our answering shouts to him.”
About ten minutes after hearing Gilkey’s last shout, Bates, Craig, and Streather roped up and traversed the slope. They turned the rib and moved cautiously toward the victim. “What we saw there I shall never forget,” Bates wrote. “The whole slope was bare of life. Art Gilkey was gone!”
As they stared at this blankness, the men noticed a new groove in the ice. The conclusion was obvious: in the time between Gilkey’s last shout and the trio’s arrival to rescue him, an avalanche had scoured the edge of the rock rib, taking the helpless victim with it. Even the two anchoring ice axes were gone. “It was as if the hand of God had swept him away,” Bates later wrote.
The three men returned to camp with the news. As shocking as it was, the team could not dwell on it, for they still faced the ordeal of getting through the night. Four men piled into the two-man tent, with only one air mattress among them; Bates opened his sleeping bag and draped it over the four men like a down comforter. The other three men were jammed even more tightly inside the minuscule bivouac tent.
Houston had suffered not only a concussion but a hemorrhage that blurred the vision in his right eye, as well as cracked ribs that made breathing painful. Molenaar had also cracked his ribs, and had received a head wound and a deep gash in his thigh. Bell was sure that both his hands and his feet were frostbitten, and he was so myopic that he was virtually blind without his glasses. Nobody slept all night.
Houston was out of his head. He became convinced that he had to cut his way out of the tent, or else everyone in it would suffocate. When his teammates physically restrained him, Houston raved, “Leave me alone. I’m a doctor, I know about these things.” Later in the night, as if half-returned to his senses, he intermittently blurted out, “How’s Pete?” Bates recalled,
I would say, “He’s all right,” but Charlie wouldn’t believe me. Then I would call across to the tiny bivouac tent, which was swelled to bursting by the three men inside, “Hey, Pete, tell Charlie you’re all right.”
Pete Schoening would call out, “I’m fine, Charlie. Don’t worry about me.”
A dozen times that night, Houston repeated, “How’s Pete?” Then he would lie quiet for a while, only to cry out,