K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [119]
Then, on June 21, with the team no higher than Camp IV at 21,500 feet, a sad event took place that could well have wrecked the expedition. Three days before, Mario Puchoz, a thirty-six-year-old guide from Courmayeur, had carried a load to Camp IV, but on returning to II complained of a throat infection. As his condition worsened, the expedition doctor put him on antibiotics and bottled oxygen. At 1:00 A.M. on June 21, in Desio’s telling, “the sick man—who had appeared to be sleeping—suddenly passed away after a very brief agony.”
The doctor had diagnosed Puchoz’s condition as pneumonia, but I wonder if it wasn’t yet another case of pulmonary edema. In a difficult maneuver, several climbers managed to lower Puchoz’s body all the way to the foot of the Abruzzi Ridge. He was then buried by his teammates “in a grave carved out of rock” near the cairn erected the year before in honor of Art Gilkey. Ever since, that cenotaph has been known as the Gilkey-Puchoz memorial.
There seems to have been no thought among the team members of canceling the expedition. But, as Lacedelli later wrote,
When we returned to the camp after burying Puchoz, Desio immediately said, “Tomorrow you need to go back up!” That started a big argument because we wanted to be left alone for at least a day, after all we had lost one of our colleagues. But Desio was immovable. He wanted us to leave the next day. We went away very upset.
When a climber dies in the early stages of an expedition, the whole team has to decide whether to call it off and go home or to continue with the effort. In the latter case, the teammates always justify the decision with a phrase like the one Lacedelli used: “We must get to the summit for Mario.”
Desio’s rationale for forging onward was more grandiose: “It was our duty, then, to continue the ascent with renewed energy, that we might the sooner be able to inscribe on Puchoz’s grave-stone the date of the feat with which his name would be forever associated.”
I’m really fortunate in that I’ve never had to face that kind of decision. In fact, I’ve never lost a partner on a climb. In that situation, I don’t know what I’d do. It’s a complicated dilemma. If there’s a single determining factor in making that choice, it seems to be the size of the expedition. The larger it is, the more likely the members are to decide to go on with their campaign and climb the mountain in honor of their fallen comrade.
In 1963, the American Everest expedition lost Jake Breitenbach, one of their youngest and most skilled members, early on, when a serac collapsed in the Khumbu Icefall, crushing him beneath tons of ice. One of the two teammates who was roped to Breitenbach and witnessed the collapse described the debris as “the size of two box cars, one atop the other.” It was obvious at once that there was no hope of even searching for the man’s body. Breitenbach had had one close buddy on the team, Barry Corbet, but he’d scarcely known most of the other climbers. That impersonality within a large expedition seems to allow the members to go through a mourning ritual, but then gird up their loins and head back into battle.
On the other hand, on Chris Bonington’s eight-man attempt on K2’s west ridge in 1978, Nick Estcourt was killed in an avalanche after the men had spent only twelve days on the mountain. Those guys were among the toughest and most ambitious mountaineers of their day, but they were all good friends of Estcourt’s and had shared previous expeditions with him. After a futile search for his body, the survivors sat down to discuss what to do. They were divided right down the middle, but since only three climbers (including Bonington)