K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [130]
Back in the States, Bob Bates and Charlie Houston learned of the Italian triumph on K2. Bates took the news philosophically. But for Houston, the ascent was deeply disturbing. He had already been granted a permit for a 1955 expedition, and, as he later recalled, “I thought that the third time we must succeed.”
Within a day after learning of the Italian success, Houston (in the words of his biographer Bernadette McDonald) “wandered into the local hospital in Nashua, forty miles from [his home in] Exeter, with no idea of who or where he was and with absolutely no identification on him.” Diagnosed with global amnesia, Houston was admitted to a hospital. A psychiatrist friend who visited him found him “weeping inconsolably,” with his short-term memory gone. The shock of the news about K2’s first ascent had apparently sent Houston over the edge.
He was soon restored to his wife and home, but it took him several weeks to recover. That autumn, Charlie Houston quit climbing for good.
7
THE DANGEROUS SUMMER
The second ascent of Mount Everest came in 1956, only three years after Hillary and Tenzing, when a Swiss party climbed the highest peak in the world and made the first ascent of neighboring Lhotse, the fourth-highest. The second ascent of K2 came only in 1977, twenty-three years after Lacedelli and Compagnoni. If anything, that second ascent represented logistical overkill far exceeding even Desio’s 1954 extravaganza. The team of Japanese in 1977 had no fewer than fifty-three members and 1,500 porters! The climbers ascended via the Abruzzi Ridge and, like the Italians, used bottled oxygen up high. In early August, seven members reached the summit. One positive note was that for the first time a native Pakistani, the Hunza Ashraf Aman, also topped out.
The Japanese expedition, however, was viewed by mountaineers around the world as a throwback. Jim Curran writes in K2: The Story of the Savage Mountain,
This, then, was the long-awaited second ascent of K2: a total anticlimax.
If it proved anything it was that with enough money and manpower success was almost guaranteed…. Even in 1977, the expedition was seen as a dinosaur, totally out of step with the current thinking epitomised by Messner and Habeler two years earlier [on their landmark alpine-style ascent of Gasherbrum I by a new route].
The allure of Everest diminished almost not at all after its first ascent. Between 1954 and 1975, no fewer than seventeen expeditions attacked the mountain, their nationalities ranging from Indian to Argentine to Spanish to American to Japanese to Chinese. During that same twenty-two-year period, not a single major expedition ventured onto K2.
The main reason for that neglect was that, thanks to political turmoil, Pakistan closed the Karakoram to climbing from 1961 through 1974. But the intrinsic difficulty of the mountain also loomed as a prohibitive factor.
With the reopening of the Karakoram, Americans renewed their pursuit of K2, sending powerful parties in 1975 and 1978. The first attempt, which tackled the complex northwest ridge, was thwarted by route-finding problems and hideous internal dissension. It was this expedition that Galen Rowell chronicled in his tell-all book In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods. The 1978 team was likewise torn with dissension, but finally placed four Americans on top. Jim Wickwire, John Roskelley, Lou Reichardt, and Rick Ridgeway—superb mountaineers, all four—made the third ascent of K2 via the long and intricate northeast ridge, which had been attempted before but never completed. (For the top 2,000 feet, the Americans’ route coincided with the Abruzzi route.) Three of the four reached the summit without supplementary oxygen.
Though they’re a bit older