K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [127]
In 1961, Le Mie Montagne had sent fireworks into the mountaineering sky above Italy. But the bombshell came in 1964, in the form of a pair of articles by a climbing journalist named Nino Giglio that appeared in the Gazzetta del Popolo, a widely read magazine. The first article was titled “After Ten Years, the Truth About K2.”
Giglio claimed that Bonatti had tried to steal the summit from Lacedelli and Compagnoni. To enlist Mahdi in this ruse, he had promised the Hunza the glory of being the first Pakistani to stand atop K2. And the reason Lacedelli and Compagnoni had run out of oxygen short of the summit was that Bonatti had siphoned off at least an hour’s worth of the precious gas as he huddled in his bivouac. In the morning, according to Giglio, Bonatti dashed down to Camp VIII, abandoning Mahdi.
At these accusations, Bonatti sprang furiously to his own defense. He instigated a libel suit against Giglio, which culminated in a 1966 trial in Turin. Not only the journalist but Compagnoni and two other teammates were called to testify. A deposition from Mahdi, in Pakistan, was conveyed to the court. Under oath, Giglio admitted that Compagnoni was the source of the incendiary charges.
Bonatti was quick to point out the impossibility of his having siphoned gas from the oxygen bottles, for he’d had no mask or regulator, without which there was no way to transfer the oxygen to his lungs. Lacedelli and Compagnoni had the masks and regulators at Camp IX.
Thus the curious cry at dusk—”Leave the masks!”—looks like a deliberate falsehood. It seemed to Bonatti that in misrepresenting the shouted conversation in the chapter of Desio’s official book, Compagnoni was already planting the seeds of the claim that Nino Giglio would voice ten years later, that Bonatti had stolen the lead climbers’ oxygen.
The outcome of the trial was total vindication for Bonatti. Yet the antagonisms indelibly tarnished Bonatti’s reputation, especially in Italy. As he told an American writer in 2003, “It’s stupid, but the whole world believed Desio and Compagnoni. Because it’s a rhetorical formula that climbers always tell the truth.”
If his K2 experience bred a lasting sense of mistrust of others, Bonatti was still determined to get some kind of revenge for his mistreatment by Lacedelli and Compagnoni. That revenge took the form of solo climbing, at a level of daring that was decades ahead of his time. In August 1955, Bonatti tackled the southwest face of the Petit Dru, above Chamonix.
Virtually no routes anywhere in the world that were, for their time, at the edge of the impossible had ever been attempted solo. Bonatti’s six-day ascent of the pillar that would be named for him nearly cost him his life. But it was so visionary an achievement that the great British Himalayan climber Doug Scott later hailed it as “probably the most important single climbing feat ever to take place in mountaineering.”
There followed, during the next decade, other visionary ascents: Gasherbrum IV in 1958, by far the hardest climb yet done in the Himalaya or the Karakoram. The north face of the Grandes Jorasses in winter, in 1963. And then, in 1965, on the one hundredth anniversary of its first ascent, a new route direttissima, solo, in winter, on the north face of the Matterhorn.
The last achievement was Bonatti’s swan song. At the age of thirty-five, he quit serious climbing overnight. (Virtually no other top mountaineer has ever ended his career in such a fashion.) He turned instead to other fields of adventure—deserts, rivers, jungles—as he reported for the magazine Época, often on daring solo expeditions.
The boldest of all Bonatti’s projects, during his miraculous decade, was one that never happened. After the Dru, he recalled in 2003, “I was in a state of grace. I felt so strong that I thought I could do anything. And the name for ‘anything’ was K2.”
For the summer of 1956, Bonatti