K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [132]
Their teammates dug out Pennington, but it was too late to save his life. John’s body was never found. After burying Pennington near the Gilkey-Puchoz memorial, the rest of the team abandoned the expedition and headed home.
John was the first guy I’d known personally who’d died in the Himalaya. (I didn’t know Alan Pennington.) Later I dug out pictures of the route and tried to figure out if I could learn anything from the catastrophe. But in the end, I had to admit that the death of the two climbers was the result of sheer bad luck. If ever there was a pure case of what we climbers call “objective danger,” it was that freak avalanche triggered by the boulder.
It’s true that on big mountains, the very lowest slopes can be among the most dangerous. In 1999 on Shishapangma, Alex Lowe, considered by many to be the best climber in the world, was killed with his partner Dave Bridges in a very similar accident, as they strolled out to reconnoiter a route they eventually hoped not only to climb but to ski down. An avalanche broke off thousands of feet above them. Lowe and Bridges tried to run for it, but were smothered by the debris. Their bodies, like Smolich’s, were never found.
But what can you learn from such grim accidents? If you want to climb an 8,000er, sooner or later you’re going to be kicking steps up an approach gully that just might avalanche.
Smolich and Pennington happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened to me.
None of the other ten teams on K2 in 1986 even considered giving up their attempts after the disaster on the Magic Line. But climbers who didn’t know the two victims gathered from many different parties to attend the impromptu funeral service on the glacier for Smolich and Pennington, and they were moved by it. John Barry, one of the best climbers on a British team attempting the unclimbed northwest ridge, later described the service in K2: Savage Mountain, Savage Summer. After Pennington’s body was lowered into a natural “sarcophagus,” Barry wrote,
An American made a dignified little speech rounding off with a Mallory quotation to the effect that we eat and make money to live—not the other way around. It was a quotation equal to the occasion. A second American, Chelsea, their Base Camp Manager, said something plain, sensible and suitable too. Everyone was holding up well. Then their doctor spoke. He got three words into his bit and broke down, and brought a few others down with him too. But it was a fine funeral, if a funeral can be fine, and K2 is as good a headstone as any parish slate.
Among the scores of climbers on different teams trying K2 in 1986, you could have assembled an international all-star cast. The Pole Jerzy Kukuczka was locked in a battle with Reinhold Messner to become the first man to reach the summit of all fourteen 8,000ers. K2 would be his eleventh such success, putting him only one peak behind Messner. The great Tyrolean mountaineer, however, aced out Kukuczka by knocking off his last two, Makalu and Lhotse, in the autumn of 1986.
It was hardly a match waged on a level playing field. By 1986, Messner was the most famous climber in Europe, perhaps in the world. He had multiple sponsors, received large fees for speaking engagements, and earned royalties from a string of books he’d written. Messner is without question one of the greatest high-altitude climbers of all time, as he demonstrated with breakthrough ascents on Everest in 1978 with Peter Habeler, without supplemental oxygen, and again on Everest solo and oxygenless two years later. But in the highly competitive circles of Himalayan aficionados, many observers pointed out that Messner usually chose the standard routes on the 8,000ers.
Kukuczka, like most Polish climbers, could barely afford each