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By Root 1144 0

Gary was still mobile all the way down to Camp II. We weren’t lowering him in a makeshift litter, as the 1953 team was with Gilkey. Gary could still walk, and could hold on to the rope I anchored, using it like a handrail. It was only when we arrived at Camp I, at 20,000 feet, that Gary collapsed and became a litter case. As the American team had with Gilkey, we then wrapped Gary in a sleeping bag and lowered him down the snowy slopes through the night. By that point there were six of us lowering and another climber at Gary’s side to steer him onto the right course.

The only time Pete Schoening wrote about K2 was in a small booklet, limited to about a hundred copies and intended only for close friends, which was published after his death in 2004. That work, however, reveals Schoening’s lifelong conviction that the team could have gotten Gilkey down the mountain: “It would have taken longer than descending by ourselves and frostbite would have been more severe. But based on experience doing rescues on steep terrain, I believe we could have done it.”

Whether or not Schoening’s faith in the team’s rescue capabilities is realistic, I’m convinced that had Gilkey not collapsed, the 1953 team would have made the first ascent of K2. They had been so successful in getting all eight climbers to 25,500 feet that I believe that, even with the stretch of bad weather that began on August 3, they could have gotten at least two men to the summit.

I also think the 1953 team was accurate in their private realization that Gilkey’s death in the avalanche might have saved their own lives. Decades after the expedition, a provocative theory started to circulate in the mountaineering world, proposed first by Tom Hornbein, Houston’s friend and the man who, with Willi Unsoeld, completed the astonishing first traverse of Everest by the west ridge in 1963. Hornbein wondered whether Gilkey, realizing what a fix his comrades were in after the accident, might have “taken the opportunity to disconnect himself from the mountainside to which he had been secured,” sacrificing himself to save his teammates.

If Hollywood were to make a movie about the ‘53 expedition, that would be the crowning touch, the perfect embodiment of what Houston would come to call “the brotherhood of the rope.” His teammates had briefly speculated about this possibility shortly after they’d discovered that Gilkey was gone. But Bates and Houston decided that it was very unlikely.

I agree with them. First of all, Gilkey was so swaddled up in his sleeping bag, he might have found it impossible to free his arms. And even if he had had a knife, could he have reached out and cut the rope with it? If he had, the ice axes anchoring him should have still been in place when Bates, Craig, and Streather arrived on the scene. But the axes vanished with Gilkey. Alternatively, it’s barely conceivable that Gilkey could have wrenched the axes loose with his hands. By then, however, he was probably too weak to do so, and that morning Houston had given him a dose of morphine to dull the pain.

Dee’s diary, written without the benefit of retrospect, is unequivocal: “After the wounded were in tents, Craig, Tony and Bates go out to bring Art in, or make him comfortable for the night. But they found the slope bare—a rock or snow avalanche had taken him down. Art is gone, dead.”

At base camp, the men congregated to discuss every last detail of their recollections of what had happened high on the mountain between August 7 and 10, and they captured their discourse on a tape recorder. On the CD called The Brotherhood of the Rope, which Houston produced in 2004, you hear the voices of the men speaking in that discussion. Some of the comments are deeply moving.

The seven survivors got back to Rawalpindi on August 28, then went their separate ways. But they stayed friends for the rest of their lives. (There aren’t many expeditions that can make that claim.) And in 1978, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the trip, all seven held a joyful and poignant reunion in the Wind River Range of Wyoming.

In 1993,