K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [116]
By the 1990s, no American expedition to an 8,000er had ever run its candidates through a training mill like the one Desio concocted. On the other hand, to this day the Russians—despite the collapse of the Soviet Union—maintain an equally Spartan tryout procedure. They’ll get a bunch of climbers together in the Caucasus and tell them to race one another up some mountain. The fastest six or so make the grade: “Okay, you guys get to go to Kangchenjunga.” As for brotherhood, the Russians are told, “You will get along.”
It sounds absurd, but you wouldn’t believe how hard the Russians fight for those slots. In the USSR, the top climbers got the title of “Master of Sport,” as well as such additional perks as a free apartment and a car.
From February 16 to 26, 1954, the CAI ran its second tryout camp on Monte Rosa, after Mont Blanc the second-highest peak in the Alps. The team was then whittled down to the eleven men who supposedly performed the best, but before they could count on going to K2, each man had to pass ear, nose, throat, and dental exams as well as receive a “prescribed course of vaccination.”
Only one of those eleven would go on to be a truly world-class mountaineer. That man was the youngest of the eleven, twenty-four-year-old Walter Bonatti, who earned his living as a hutkeeper near his hometown of Monza. Despite his youth, Bonatti already had a better record than any of his teammates on cutting-edge routes in the Alps. On K2, he would end up as the pivotal figure in the dark controversy that would forever tarnish the Italian triumph—a controversy that would still burn half a century later.
One shocking result emerged from the tryout camps. Ricardo Cassin, the greatest climber in Italy in 1954, was rejected. The official explanation was that he had failed a medical test, but climbers all over Italy knew better. Fifty-two years after the expedition, and five years after Desio’s death at the astonishing age of 104, one of the principal K2 climbers, Lino Lacedelli, set the record straight:
Desio’s version was that Cassin was unable to take part for health reasons. Varicose veins were mentioned, amongst other things. But that wasn’t the real reason. If Cassin had come, all the newspapers would have focused on him rather than Desio. To me that was obvious. Cassin never got over it. He’s still upset today. For us climbers, having Cassin along would have been really great.
In his own way, Cassin took his revenge for being snubbed. In 1958, he played a crucial role in the first ascent of Gasherbrum IV in the Karakoram, as Walter Bonatti and Carlo Mauri reached the summit, setting a new standard of difficulty in the Karakoram and the Himalaya. And in 1961, at the age of fifty-two, he led the first Italian team to climb in Alaska since the Duke of the Abruzzi in 1897, as they tackled the un-climbed south face of Mount McKinley. Despite incurring serious frostbite, all six members reached the summit. The beautifully direct route, known today simply as “the Cassin,” is the most storied line on North America’s highest peak. In January 2009, Cassin himself turned one hundred years old.
Rereading Ascent of K2 today, I was struck by how completely unaware Desio was of the semicomic consequences of the gargantuan logistical effort required to keep his marching army in motion. From Skardu to Askole, for instance, the 500 porters so far employed by the Italians consumed 1,100 pounds of flour per day. There wasn’t anything like that reserve of grain in the region, so other porters had to hurry ahead to lay in depots of flour at Askole.
I’ve seen this happen on even smaller expeditions. You end up needing porters to carry the food for the other porters, who are in turn carrying food and gear for the Europeans. This makes for a huge logistical headache, but it’s unavoidable