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expedition he went on. But what was most admirable about his campaign on the 8,000ers—in 1987, he became the second person to claim all fourteen—was that he almost never opted for the easiest route. Ten of his ascents of the highest peaks were by new routes, and four came in winter—including the first winter ascent of Annapurna, an achievement that still awes me, twenty-two years later. Sadly, Kukuczka died near the top of the unclimbed south face of Lhotse in 1989, when a rope broke. It’s a dreary testament to this great mountaineer’s continued poverty that the rope was a cheap six-millimeter cord he had picked up in a market in Kathmandu.

In 1986, Kukuczka was determined to climb a new route up the center of K2’s south face. And he intended to pull off this deed alpine-style, with but a single fellow Pole as his partner.

Clear on the other side of K2, climbing out of China rather than Pakistan, a very strong American team was attempting the north ridge. Its members also included several superstars, among them Alex Lowe, George Lowe (no relation to Alex), Dave Cheesmond, and Catherine Freer, considered the best American woman alpinist of her day. Despite having such experts along, the team had to turn back a little above 26,500 feet, defeated by storms and terrible snow conditions. As mentioned above, Alex Lowe would die on Shishapangma thirteen years later. And Cheesmond and Freer vanished in 1987, on an incredibly bold two-person alpine-style attempt on the Hummingbird Ridge of Mount Logan, in Canada. Speculation had it that their tent, pitched on a narrow curl of the relentlessly steep and twisting ridge, broke loose with a cornice that collapsed, sending them hurtling to the glacier thousands of feet below. Their bodies, like Lowe’s, were never found.

Another all-star on the mountain in 1986 was the Frenchman Benoît Chamoux. His project was to climb the Abruzzi faster than anyone ever had before. If you wonder just how dangerous trying to climb all the 8,000ers really is, you should contemplate the fates of Kukuczka and Chamoux. In 1995, the Frenchman would disappear near the summit of Kangchenjunga, which would have been his fourteenth and last 8,000er. The scuttlebutt had it that Chamoux wanted Kangchenjunga too badly, as he was running head-to-head with the Swiss mountaineer Erhard Loretan for the honor of being the third man to nail the whole list.

Yet another climbing celebrity was the Italian Renato Casarotto. His K2 plans were probably the most ambitious of anybody’s that summer. The Magic Line on the south face had repulsed a number of previous attempts. Casarotto wanted to make its first ascent solo.

At age fifty-four, the Austrian Kurt Diemberger was well past his prime, but by 1986 he was a mountaineering legend. Way back in 1957, he had paired with Hermann Buhl (the man who had made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat solo four years earlier) and two other Austrians to become the first climbers to reach the top of Broad Peak, the twelfth-highest mountain in the world. Theirs was an admirably lightweight assault, accomplished virtually alpine-style, that set a new standard among the 8,000ers. Only eighteen days after summitting on Broad Peak, however, as Diemberger and Buhl retreated from nearby Chogolisa in a gathering storm, a cornice broke loose, taking Buhl to his death. (Like those of so many victims in the Himalaya and the Karakoram, Buhl’s body has never been found.)

In 1960, Diemberger was a member of a combined Swiss-Austrian team that made the first ascent of Dhaulagiri, the world’s seventh-highest peak. He and Buhl remain eternally the only two climbers to make the first ascents of two different 8,000ers. In 1986, Diemberger joined a large team on K2 to serve chiefly as a filmmaker, but he wanted very much to reach the summit with the woman who had become his regular climbing partner, Julie Tullis from Great Britain.

The strong British team attempting the northwest ridge was led by Alan Rouse, among the elite of his country’s high-altitude mountaineers. That party had an additional incentive,