K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [117]
At Urdukas, appalled by the wintry conditions of early May, the porters at first refused to go on. This delay meant that the team immediately needed another thousand pounds of flour, so Desio sent porters back to Askole to haul up the reserves that had been stocked in previous weeks. The caravan finally got going again, but it was no surprise that the porters called an all-out strike at Concordia. Unless the team could get its sixteen tons of stuff up the last ten miles to base camp, the expedition was doomed. Desio sounds dumbfounded by this “desertion” on the part of the porters: “Thereupon they dumped their loads and, uttering hostile shouts and singing religious songs, returned that same evening the way they had come. I was perplexed and disconcerted.”
It took the intervention of the liaison officer (the same Pakistani who had served admirably on Houston’s expedition) to sort out the mess and, in effect, bribe enough porters to carry the loads the rest of the way to base camp. It was only because the team had left Italy so early in the season that, despite all the delays en route from Skardu, they were well established at base camp by May 29.
As the 1953 American team had done, the Italians hired Hunzas from Gilgit to serve as high-altitude porters. Those thirteen men would play a far more essential role on the Abruzzi Ridge than did the Hunzas in ‘53, who never went above Camp III. Two of the Hunzas would go as high as the Italian Camp VIII, at 25,300 feet, and one of them, Amir Mahdi, would perform a heroic deed that would lead directly to the team’s eventual success and to the bitter controversy that spun out of it. Yet Desio’s narrative credits the Hunzas’ work only in the most cursory way.
One measure of how tedious Ascent of K2 is as an account of the expedition is that the reader doesn’t get to Skardu until page 94, to base camp until page 122—more than halfway through the 239-page book. And rather than seem the slightest bit embarrassed by his party’s logistical overkill, Desio revels in it. That’s a very 1950s attitude: the more gear and food, the more porters, the author implies, the more serious the expedition. It would take another couple of decades before a lightweight approach to the world’s highest mountains would start to seem purer and bolder than a massive army-style assault.
Desio also revels in his role as generalissimo. Before leaving Skardu, the leader took a flight around K2 in a plane flown by Pakistani pilots. There was absolutely no need for that flight for reconnaissance, since the climbers knew they were going to tackle the Abruzzi Ridge, about which they had learned everyting they needed to know from the Americans in Rawalpindi. But Desio devotes eight humdrum pages of his book to this joyride. It all falls vaguely under the heading of “Science” with a capital “S.” As Desio sums up this aerial diversion,
Unfortunately, the responsibility of guiding the pilots, coupled with the extremely high speed of the aircraft, prevented me from collecting all the information I would have liked regarding the orographical structure of the region and above all the relative positions of the various glacial basins. But a patient and scientific examination of our films and photographic surveys may well lead to the discovery of many hitherto unsuspected geographical features.
When I first read that paragraph, I had to look up “orographical.” It means “having to do with the branch of physical geography dealing with mountains.” I rest my case.
As early as May 26, four climbers started up the Abruzzi, hoping to discover the site of the Americans’ Camp II. (The launch of the climb that was the expedition’s central focus does not appear until page 138 of the book.) Before they could get started, though, the mountaineers were required to digest a route guide their leader had prepared.
That guide, reprinted in full in Ascent, represents a classic case of micromanaging