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In 1975, the Japanese Junko Tabei had become the first woman to climb Mount Everest. By 1986, no woman had yet reached the top of K2. A number of women had tried, including the Americans Dianne Roberts, Cherie Bech, and Diana Jagersky in 1978. But no woman had yet even come close to summitting. (According to Rick Ridgeway’s The Last Step, much of the dissension among the 1978 team sprang from the conviction among some of the climbers—notably the blunt, outspoken John Roskelley—that Roberts had no business on the mountain, but was along simply because she was the wife of expedition leader Jim Whittaker.)

Two women on K2 in 1986 seemed capable of making the first female ascent. One was Liliane Barrard from France, who had previously climbed Gasherbrum II and Nanga Parbat. The other was the Pole Wanda Rutkiewicz, widely regarded today as the finest high-altitude female climber of all time. Unable to afford an expedition of her own, Rutkiewicz joined Barrard’s team, launching a friendly rivalry over which woman would get to the summit first.

By 1992, Rutkiewicz had summitted on eight of the fourteen 8,000ers. Many in the climbing world assumed that she would eventually join the ranks of the very few men who had bagged all fourteen. But that May—how often the paths of such ambitious climbers lead to the same dismal outcome!—she disappeared near the summit of Kangchenjunga, just as Chamoux would three years later.

Many of the climbers involved in the “dangerous summer” of 1986 would later write about it, but only one produced a comprehensive narrative of all the confusing events that took place between June and August. Jim Curran had joined Alan Rouse’s northwest ridge expedition primarily as a cinematographer, but also to write a book, should the team succeed. Though not at the top level as a mountaineer, and with no ambitions to reach the summit, Curran was (and is) one of Britain’s finest mountaineering writers. In the end, instead of writing only about his own expedition, Curran attempted to cover the stories of all eleven teams on the mountain, in his deft 1987 chronicle K2: Triumph and Tragedy.

By the time the avalanche snuffed out the lives of Smolich and Pennington, Liliane Barrard’s team was high on the Abruzzi Ridge. The foursome was led by Maurice Barrard, Liliane’s husband and inseparable climbing partner. Along with Wanda Rutkiewicz, the party was rounded out by another strong Frenchman, Michel Parmentier.

Afterward, Rutkiewicz wrote a short account in Polish of her team’s adventure on the Abruzzi. (Translated into English, it is reprinted as an appendix in Curran’s book.) Rutkiewicz’s report is the only insider account of what happened to Barrard’s team.

In the spring of 1986 in Paris, Maurice Barrard had met with Kurt Diemberger to discuss the Abruzzi route. In The Endless Knot, Diemberger’s own account of K2, he quotes a statement by Barrard that, in view of what transpired on August 1, 2008, has an eerie prescience:

“I have serious misgivings about the serac wall on that hanging glacier,” Maurice had confided … pointing to a photograph of the summit pyramid. “It is definitely worse now than it was in 1979. Look at this latest shot: the fracture zone along this great balcony bit looks to have more cracks than ever. Heaven knows how much will come off and funnel down through the Bottleneck.”

From the start of their climb, Rutkiewicz got along so poorly with Parmentier that she refused to share a tent with him, camping instead in a small two-man tent she borrowed from the British. Trying to climb fast and light through deep, soft snow, the team managed successive gains of only 650 and 1,300 vertical feet on June 21 and 22. Their last camp was at the remarkable altitude of 27,200 feet. Rutkiewicz does not identify the site except to call it “a small rock platform”—my guess is that it was on the ramp after the climb of the Bottleneck and the delicate leftward traverse. Rutkiewicz wrote, “We spent the night there … without