K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [135]
The climbers had only just over 1,000 vertical feet to climb the next day to reach the summit, but on June 23 they gained ground at a snail’s pace. It may be that they were simply too early in the season, for the snow on the summit cap stayed relentlessly deep and soft. Barrard’s team was the first that year to reach the summit snowfield, so they had had no fixed ropes to rely on above about 24,000 feet, and no one had broken trail ahead of them.
The four climbers left their squalid camp at 7:30 A.M. on June 23. Halfway to the summit, however, Maurice Barrard made what seemed to Rutkiewicz a very strange announcement: “Now we will rest here for a couple of hours and cook something.” Out of his pack he pulled a stove, a pot, and packets of instant soup.
That was indeed a bizarre decision. On summit day on an 8,000er, every minute counts. For liquid, you need to sip from a water bottle you’ve filled that morning or the night before, which you carry in a chest pocket to keep the fluid from freezing. I can’t imagine sitting down at something like 27,800 feet on K2 to brew up soup!
Rutkiewicz felt the same way. “I didn’t want to stay such a long time there drinking soup,” she later wrote. “I was in a hurry. The summit was beckoning. So I left the others and started out on my own.”
The Pole reached the top at 10:15 A.M., becoming the first woman to climb K2. She wrote a little note, signing it with both her and Liliane’s names, and placed it in a plastic bag tucked into some rocks just below the summit. Given the frictions within the team, it’s surprising that Rutkiewicz didn’t immediately head down. Instead, she waited a long while for her teammates and then, after they arrived, shared an hour’s celebration with them on top.
The upshot was that the foursome did not regain their 27,200-foot camp until late afternoon. Rutkiewicz was of a mind to keep heading down, but Maurice Barrard urged that they spend the night in the single tent pitched on the rock platform, and she acquiesced. She would later write, “I was tired, but not exhausted. The weather was still good and I was not worried. But I should have been. One should remain at that altitude as short a time as possible. I didn’t know in the sunshine that death was following us down.”
To try to sleep, Rutkiewicz took two and a half Mogadon tablets. As recently as 1986, climbers routinely popped sleeping pills at high camps, but it was later discovered to be a very dangerous practice. Pills such as Valium and Mogadon continue to depress one’s pulse rate and other aspects of the cardiovascular system for twelve hours or more after waking, which isn’t a good thing for any athlete, much less a mountaineer at 27,000 feet. I never took sleeping pills up high, mainly because I wanted to be fully alert in case a storm blew in during the night or something else went wrong.
In the morning, Rutkiewicz felt groggy and her balance was off, but she recognized the urgency of getting down the mountain. Parmentier set off first, but both Liliane and Maurice Barrard seemed completely lethargic and moved very slowly. The climb to the summit without supplemental oxygen, sandwiched between two nights spent with four people crammed into a small tent without sleeping bags at 27,200 feet, had taken its physical toll. Soon the gap between the Barrards and their two teammates widened. At Camp III, at 25,250 feet, Rutkiewicz caught up to Parmentier. Several Italians and the Frenchman Benoît Chamoux were there as well, heading up on an attempt they would abort the next day, in the face of a gathering storm. At Camp III, Rutkiewicz and Parmentier waited for the Barrards, but they never arrived. Their teammates were still not overly concerned, since the French couple were carrying the tent and could presumably have pitched it wherever they found themselves by nightfall.
In the morning, Rutkiewicz headed down, as did the Italians and Chamoux, but Parmentier insisted on waiting for the Barrards. It took the Polish woman