K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [115]
The most expensive expedition I ever went on was Jim Whittaker’s International Peace Climb of Everest in 1990, because we Americans footed the bill not only for ourselves but for the Russian and Chinese climbers as well. Far more typical of my expeditions, though, would be one like my last attempt on Annapurna, in 2005. With only three climbers on the team—Jimmy Chin, Veikka Gustafsson, and myself—that trip cost us only $18,000, even though we indulged in the luxury of helicoptering in to base camp.
Another sign of the times, and of just how nationalistic an enterprise K2 was for the Italians, emerges from the fact that a substantial part of their budget was raised by the Club Alpino Italiano (CAI), which solicited contributions from its members. That kind of appeal sure wouldn’t fly today! If I’d hit up AAC members for contributions so I could go to Annapurna in 2005, I doubt that I would have found very many checks filling my mailbox. On the other hand, in 1954 there was no such thing as a climber being sponsored by equipment companies. Nowadays, we’re on our own when it comes to raising money for an expedition—we’re no longer carrying the banner of the good old U.S. of A.
By late autumn of 1953, Desio and his cronies in the CAI had made a list of twenty-three climbers to be invited to audition for the expedition. Desio chose his scientists by word of mouth, but the climbers had to undergo a much more rigorous screening. In the winter of 1952–53, Houston had whittled his roster of applicants down from about twenty-five to five, but his process, while relatively stringent, had required only a brief interview in Exeter, New Hampshire (and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, Dee Molenaar didn’t even have to fly east to get chosen). Desio instead organized a pair of winter mountain training runs in the Alps, which doubled as tryouts. In Ascent he solemnly ticks off the qualities sought in the candidates: “good health and physical fitness, strength of character and iron determination, mental preparedness and a readiness for the task at hand based on recent mountaineering experience. All other qualities were of secondary importance.”
The candidates first assembled in mid-January on a glacial plateau near Cervinia for a ten-day camp. The men, as Desio reported, were put through their paces as they found themselves “taking part in various climbing exercises on rocks and ice, practis[ing] setting up tents on the western spur of the Little Matterhorn, conveying packages along a specially-constructed light rope-way, communicating with one another by portable radio, etc.” At the end of the ten days, some doctors hiked up to the plateau to administer “psycho-physical tests.” Afterward, a panel of thirteen self-styled experts cut two of the candidates from the list.
To me, the whole thing sounds both brutal and ridiculous. It’s pretty tough to forge brotherhood when you’re competing with the guy on the other end of the rope for a place on the team. You can’t build an effective team based only on the skill levels of the climbers, and mutual respect and trust can’t be dictated from on high. Near the beginning of my climbing career, from 1980 to 1982, I tried out with Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. (RMI) in hopes of landing a job as a Rainier guide, and I got hired only on my third attempt. But RMI handled the whole business in a pretty humane way; the veterans explained that