K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [109]
Somehow the men got through the night. They managed to melt snow and brew up tea, which they passed from one tent to the other. The wind dropped, but in the morning the sky was a leaden gray, presaging yet another storm. It would take a dogged effort simply to pack up and start down the dangerous slopes leading to Camp VI.
There was not even an ice ax for every man. The most seriously injured, Houston was still drifting in and out of reality, so Schoening and Craig tied him into the middle of a three-man rope, and Schoening, coming last, belayed Houston on every tricky stretch. The team leader stopped several times, sat down, and, as Bates observed, “put his chin in his hand, and looked around as if to say, ‘What are we doing here?’” Schoening would exhort, “Come on, Charlie. Let’s go!” Houston would rise wearily to his feet and continue the descent.
Though none of them said a word to each other, each man realized that Gilkey’s disappearance had probably saved their own lives. Even more disturbingly, as they covered the ground below their emergency Camp VII, the men climbed past splotches of blood stuck to the snow and the protruding rocks. None of them mentioned this grim memento mori until decades later. But that night, Dee wrote in his diary, “Enroute down, we passed a tangle of ropes and torn sleeping bag that had held Art, with track of blood speckling snow below, indicating he had died quickly. Poor Art. We all passed by this wreckage silently.”
It took the team five days to limp down the mountain. That they pulled off that descent without another accident is a tribute not only to the toughness of those seven men but to the depth of their solicitude for one another. Still, when they reached base camp on August 15, they were a demoralized crew, with the pall of defeat heavy on their spirits and the weight of sorrow over the loss of their teammate even heavier.
On a small ridge above base camp, the Hunzas built a rock cairn as a memorial to Art Gilkey. Over the years since 1953, plaques commemorating other climbers who died on K2 have been added to the cairn. The memorial has become a solemn shrine for all the expedition members who place their base camps on the Godwin Austen Glacier.
I think I was sixteen when I read K2: The Savage Mountain. I was so impressed by the story that in a high school class in expository writing, when the teacher assigned us to write a play, I wrote about K2, with the plot revolving around the dilemma of having to leave somebody behind on the mountain. What really inspired me about those guys on the 1953 expedition is how they took care of one another, how they bonded in adversity. Later I would realize that there was a kind of military model for their courage, in the motto “Leave no man behind.”
But you can’t teach that kind of morality. Those guys were all selfless by nature. They all had high ethical standards. I’m sure their example helped me form my own moral principles, so that much later, when I had to put aside my personal ambitions to go to the aid of another climber in trouble, I did so without hesitation. I know I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try to help out when I had the chance.
In 1992, when Scott and I were climbing above our Camp III toward the Shoulder, we suddenly realized that we were traversing the very slope where Schoening had stopped the interlinked falls of his six teammates and where Gilkey had been swept away by the avalanche. We slowed down as we discussed just how those events must have unfolded thirty-nine years before. The slope was self-evidently a treacherous place, and in that moment, it came home to us just how hopeless it would be to try to carry a completely incapacitated teammate down the mountain.
Houston was right in that grim passage about his thoughts after diagnosing Gilkey’s thrombophlebitis: “There was no hope, absolutely none. Art was crippled…. We could not carry him down.” In 1992, we had gotten Gary Ball, stricken with pulmonary edema, down that same stretch through the Black Pyramid. But