K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [128]
In the end, Bonatti failed to attract any sponsors who could have given him a shot at K2 solo, and he was far too poor to pay his own way. It is hard to appreciate today just how far ahead of its time Bonatti’s scheme was. A comparable feat would not be performed for another twenty-four years, when Reinhold Messner climbed Everest solo, without oxygen, in 1980. I can relate to Bonatti’s impulse: my own frustration with the lack of cohesion and teamwork on K2 in 1992 drove me to a solo attempt on Everest the next year.
Meanwhile, however, Bonatti could not put K2 behind him. In the end, he would write three books about his K2 experience, reprinting document after legal document as he sought vindication not only in the courts but in the eyes of the public.
Bonatti had always been convinced that Lacedelli and Compagnoni had placed their Camp IX out of sight—among the scattered rocks at the foot of the summit pyramid, above a dangerous traverse—in order to keep him and Mahdi from joining them in the cramped tent, and perhaps going to the summit with them the next day. After their heroic load carry on July 30, however, both men would have been too exhausted to try for the top the next day. But a shared tent could have saved their lives, and certainly would have prevented the frostbite that left Mahdi permanently maimed.
Vindication in this respect finally came in 2006, with Lacedelli’s K2: The Price of Conquest. There the Cortina guide confessed to the very ruse Bonatti had long suspected. In Lacedelli’s telling, the whole thing was Compagnoni’s idea:
I only understood later…. I believe he didn’t want Bonatti to reach us. When I saw Bonatti come towards us I asked Compagnoni why he didn’t want him to reach us and he said that it was just the two of us that had to make the final climb to the summit.
Lacedelli also confirmed that he and his partner had the crucial masks and regulators in their tent, and thus that the accusation that Bonatti had siphoned off oxygen was spurious.
Bonatti also never believed that Lacedelli and Compagnoni had used up their bottled oxygen and gone on to the summit without its aid. That was a myth, he believed, intended to make the summit push more dramatic. And after the 1964 accusations came out, Bonatti realized how the tale of running out of oxygen fed into the imputation that he had siphoned off gas during his bivouac, leaving less than enough for the summit duo.
In K2: The Price of Conquest, however, Lacedelli still insists that he and Compagnoni ran out of oxygen on the way up but carried the useless bottles all the way to the summit. By 2006, however, Bonatti had a new ally, in the curious form of an Australian surgeon and armchair climber named Robert Marshall, who had become fascinated by the controversy. Marshall taught himself Italian just so he could become a close student of the episode, met Bonatti, and eventually put together the definitive casebook of Bonatti’s side of the story, published in the United States in 2001 in Bonatti’s valedictory work, The Mountains of My Life.
Marshall contributed several key new insights to the muddled affair. Analyzing the rate of climb of the summit pair, and taking at face value their claim to have started upward on July 31 at 6:15 in the morning, he calculated that through nine and a half hours of climbing with gas, Lacedelli and Compagnoni would have averaged 168 vertical feet per hour. Then, from 26,700 feet to the summit, suddenly bereft of oxygen but carrying the weight of the useless bottles, they miraculously increased their pace to 320 feet per hour. This goes against everything other climbers have reported