K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [113]
Making arcane discoveries about the rate of flow of a certain glacier or the linguistics of Balti hill tribes was obviously not going to stir the blood of the Italian public the way getting up K2 would, but Desio was adamant about his scientific program. In Ascent of K2, the professor acknowledged that many observers were skeptical of his two-pronged attack on the Karakoram:
Its programme caused some bewilderment in mountaineering circles, where it was felt that so much scientific activity might seriously interfere with the work of the climbing party. That I refused to be deflected from my course was due to my conviction that success could be achieved above all by careful preparation and by an appropriate distribution of the tasks of the two teams in space and time.
That passage gives the flavor of Desio’s writing throughout the book. It’s hard for me to think of any “official” account of a dramatic expedition that’s as boring as Desio’s Ascent, or as chock-full of pompous posing and self-congratulatory slaps on the back.
An old tradition, with roots in the Victorian age, argues that exploration for its own sake is simply self-indulgence, and that every adventure in the wilderness should have a scientific purpose. The most poignant example of that faith in science that I know of comes from Robert Falcon Scott’s last expedition. When his teammates finally discovered Scott’s last camp on his return from the south pole, eight months after the leader and his four brave comrades had starved and frozen to death, they found more than thirty pounds of rocks—geological specimens—still loaded on Scott’s sledge.
By 1954, however, that tradition was almost obsolete. Certainly Houston’s and Wiessner’s expeditions to K2 had made no pretense of carrying out any scientific work (unless you count Cranmer and Sheldon’s little “geologizing” jaunt to Urdukas, which was likely nothing more than an excuse to flee base camp).
Desio took his science so seriously that he ends Ascent of K2 not with the climbers’ triumphant return to base camp and thence to civilization but with two chapters called “The Work of the Scientists” and “Summary of the Expedition’s Scientific Researches.” While the climbers were struggling up the Abruzzi Ridge, the “professors” were puttering about the glaciers, doing things like taking magnetic observations and collecting “fauna” found above 13,000 feet. (In 1992, the only fauna we saw at base camp were goraks—huge, black ravenlike birds—and mice, and I sure didn’t feel like collecting any of them.)
Of the latter effort, Desio observes, with his habitual smugness, “I personally took part in this work, the results of which will repay study on the part of specialists.” And he closes the book not with a line like Herzog’s famous “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men” but as follows: “Only when the fruits of our labours are enshrined in the five volumes scheduled for eventual publication shall we be able to say that the expedition’s work is done.” I wonder how many people have read those five volumes—assuming they ever got published.
The professor was not only a scientist; he was a born generalissimo. On the mountain, the climbers would obey his orders to the letter, or else. Desio justified the militaristic organization of his team in a memo he sent to all the potential expedition candidates beforehand. He quotes it in full in Ascent of K2. It’s not a document that many climbers I know of would have been happy signing off on:
The need for rigid discipline will become apparent to every man once he has grasped the essential fact that everything must be subordinated to the attainment of the final goal, which