K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [131]
During the first years after the embargo ended, Pakistan limited the expeditions on K2 to one a year. The Ministry of Tourism, however, couldn’t help noticing what the Nepalese were doing with Everest, granting permits to multiple expeditions within a single year. Since that’s such an obvious moneymaker for the government, it’s a wonder the Pakistanis didn’t start the practice sooner.
By the early 1980s, K2 was “hot” in mountaineering circles. Four expeditions focused on the mountain in 1982, four again the following year, and four in 1985. In 1986, Pakistan at last opened the floodgates. That year, no fewer than eleven separate parties would congregate on the slopes of K2.
Meanwhile, in the years from 1978 through 1985, the mountain witnessed six more fatalities. There was Nick Estcourt from the British team in 1978, buried by an avalanche. The next year, two Pakistanis died, one of a heart attack, one by falling into a crevasse. In 1982, a Pole also died of a heart attack, and a Japanese climber fell on the descent after reaching the summit by a new route, the north ridge. And in 1985, a Frenchman died on the descent of the Abruzzi Ridge.
By the end of 1985, then, thirty-nine men (but no women) had reached the summit of K2, while twelve had died trying. With the summer of 1986, that ratio would become much worse.
There were two American teams on K2 that year. One of the ironies in my life that I’ll never stop thinking about is that I was invited on one of those two expeditions, before I’d ever been anywhere in the Himalaya or the Karakoram. In 1986 I was twenty-six years old, in my fourth year of guiding during summers at Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. (RMI), but during the school year I was getting my doctorate in veterinary medicine at Washington State University. One of my RMI colleagues was a guy named John Smolich who’d been to Everest in 1984. John was a phenomenally strong climber, but he came across as soft-spoken and gentle. I really respected him.
John was the leader of an eight-man team from the Pacific Northwest. They were superambitious: instead of the classic Abruzzi Ridge, they were aiming at the beautiful, unclimbed route on the south face that Reinhold Messner had called the “Magic Line.” Sometime that winter, John invited me to join the team. Andy Politz, another RMI guide, was also on board. He was an even closer buddy, the guy I’d bailed off Rainier with in a winter storm, when I survived the only unplanned bivouac of my life. Andy and I had also invented our “load wars”—an ongoing competition to see who could carry the most groceries to Camp Muir while guiding clients. And in 1983, Andy and I had served as junior guides under Phil Ershler on an RMI-led ascent of Denali—my first expedition ever.
I was deeply flattered to be invited to K2, and sorely tempted. There was no way, however, that I could skip out of my summer externship at Washington State. With great regret, I turned down the invitation.
The Americans had been at base camp for only three weeks when, on June 21, Smolich and teammate Alan Pennington started up the approach gully at the base of the Magic Line. Almost immediately, at 5:30 in the morning, they heard a loud roar. Morning sun striking the face had dislodged a huge boulder thousands of feet above. (That boulder had been considered so stable that on a previous foray up to Camp II, some of the team members had anchored a fixed rope to it.)