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By Root 1065 0

Compagnoni’s account, the two men left their tent at 5:00 A.M. They traversed across the slope, then headed straight down to the site of the cache Bonatti and Mahdi had left. He reported, “Having reached our objective, we hoisted the crates each containing three cylinders onto our backs.” This is a key passage, for in it Compagnoni acknowledges that heavy oxygen bottles were the cargo Bonatti and Mahdi had hauled up to 26,000 feet. Yet in the dialogue quoted above, the men demand “Leave the masks!” Why masks, not bottles? A possible reason for this strange locution would not emerge until many years after the expedition.

By now, the mist had risen and the first snowflakes had started to fall. It sounds like a situation similar to ours on summit day in 1992. And the two men now uttered words very much like the ones Scott, Charley, and I exchanged. Their dialogue is captured in the summit chapter of Desio’s Ascent of K2. “What do you say?” Lacedelli asked. Compagnoni answered, “I say we ought to have a try.” (It’s of course quite convenient that Compagnoni gives himself the credit for being the more committed climber.)

At the foot of the Bottleneck, the two men decided the couloir was too dangerous. Fifteen years earlier, insisted Compagnoni, Wiessner had found the ice “clear and firm,” but now “it was covered with such a mass of snow that it would have been madness to climb it.” Madness, one presumes, because it looked ready to avalanche, not because of the hanging ice cliff far above.

So the two men attacked the very edge of the rock band, several hundred feet left of the Bottleneck. Compagnoni took a short leader fall but was unhurt; Lacedelli led a hundred-foot cliff after taking off both his crampons and his gloves. “Here, in fact,” Compagnoni writes, “we found that our resources were already taxed to the limit.”

Hours passed by. The men slowly solved the edge of the rock band, then the ramp leading left to the summit snowfield. In one place, the snow was so deep, it took Compagnoni an hour to gain 50 vertical feet. Then: “Suddenly, at intervals of a few seconds, we both experienced a horrible sensation. We found ourselves gasping for breath.” The two men had used up their bottled oxygen.

This event would prove to be a critical pivot point in the controversy that would, for half a century, hang over the first ascent. Strangely enough, rather than dump the useless bottles, the men kept the “crates” on their backs. Realizing that this would make little sense to other climbers, Compagnoni offers a four-point explanation. The key claims are two: that the pair wanted to leave something on the summit to prove their ascent, and that “in order to discard the crates we should have had to throw ourselves flat on the snow, which was very deep and unstable.”

This sounds just plain weird. During the few expeditions on which I’ve used supplemental oxygen—when I was guiding clients on Everest, for instance—I’ve always found that I can barely tolerate the weight even with the oxygen flowing. If I ran out of oxygen, I’d just chuck the thing, because you simply don’t have the strength to carry useless bottles. In 1991 on Everest, when a faulty valve screwed up my oxygen rig, I simply shrugged off my pack and left the thing sitting in the snow. It’s hard to imagine that Lacedelli and Compagnoni couldn’t ditch those heavy bottles with a similar shrug of the shoulders.

The men plugged on. All the way up, Compagnoni insists, the men took not a single sip of water. He adds, “We had feared that the lack of oxygen would result in a loss of energy, but this was not so.” That claim, too, doesn’t quite ring true. When you’re breathing gas for hours and suddenly run out, you crash with a vengeance. Jon Krakauer describes that happening to him on Everest in 1996, as he reached the Hillary Step on his way down from the summit: “My cognitive functions, which had been marginal before, instantly went into a nosedive. I felt like I’d been slipped an overdose of a powerful sedative.”

At 6:00 P.M., Compagnoni and Lacedelli reached the summit. They