K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [118]
Camp VI to Camp VII. A rise of 1,640 feet. After negotiating a series of steep, difficult rocks, necessitating the use of several pitons, the climber is confronted with a dangerous eastward traverse of some 590 feet over ice which slopes at an angle of 45°.
Whether or not Desio got the idea from Pete Schoening’s A-frame tripod, which the Americans had used to haul loads up House’s Chimney, the Italians brought along a thousand-foot-long steel cable and constructed a pair of windlasses, crank-operated hauling devices. This apparatus would serve to lug vast quantities of gear over stretches as long as a thousand feet, all the way up to Camp V, at 22,000 feet. On June 2, Desio found a small saddle on the Godwin Austen Glacier; from there he supervised the first attempt to use a windlass to get loads to Camp II. “All went well,” he reported.
Slowly the climbers and the Hunzas got camps established and huge piles of gear ferried and winched up the route. And as the distance between them and base camp grew, the climbers allowed themselves various small acts of resistance to the iron mandates of their dictator down below.
This was not easy. Every day, Desio typed out—on an actual typewriter hauled all the way to base camp—the orders for the day, then had them carried by the Hunzas or radioed up to the climbers. In 2003, when he was interviewed by an American journalist, Lino Lacedelli recalled one such command: “Order 13: ‘Who will not obey my orders will be punished with the heaviest weapon in the world—the press.’
“We called him ‘Il Capetto’ [the Little Chief],” Lacedelli reminisced. (Desio was shorter than all the climbers, some of whom stood no more than five foot five.)
In one critical respect, the 1954 Italian plan for K2 differed from those of all previous expeditions to the mountain: up high, the climbers intended to use bottled oxygen. Those bottles themselves would become a major cause of the enduring controversy.
Desio was such a control freak that long before the climbers got high on the mountain, he had decided on the precise movements to be carried out on the summit assault. The memorandum of instructions for that assault is also reprinted verbatim in Ascent of K2. A sample:
Second day. B, C, and possibly also A, the group-leader, will move up to Camp IX together with F and G. A, B and C will each carry an oxygen-mask complete with cylinders and sufficient food for two days. F and G will carry oxygen-masks in addition to a Super K2 tent and two small cylinders filled with propane. B, C and possibly A will spend the night at Camp IX, while F and G will return to Camp VIII.
You cannot, of course, dictate these kinds of troop movements on an 8,000er. Everything depends on the weather, the snow conditions, and the relative strengths of different climbers, so up high you always have to be flexible and ready to improvise to meet the challenges thrown at you. Desio just didn’t seem to get this fundamental truth about mountaineering.
The oldest among the eleven climbers, at age forty, was Achille Compagnoni. A guide and ski instructor, he had a decent record as an alpinist but was not the equal of several of his teammates, including Lacedelli and Bonatti. Nevertheless, early on Desio appointed Compagnoni as his climbing leader. This choice didn’t sit well with some of those teammates. Lacedelli wrote in 2006, in K2: The Price of Conquest:
More than anything Desio preferred those who agreed with him. Most of us were not happy with this. We were not the sort of characters to flatter the expedition leader. We did what we had to and that was all….
[Compagnoni] flattered Desio and vice versa. This annoyed us a lot, particularly later on when Desio made him leader of the first climbing group [for the summit assault]. None of us felt he deserved this.
The mutual ass-kissing between Compagnoni and Desio leaves its traces in the pages of Ascent. Desio