K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [139]
I started down with Tadeusz behind me. The ice was harder than usual. Just after I warned Tadeusz to go a little to my left, I saw one of his crampons slip off. When he tried to bang his other foot into the ice, the crampon shot off his other boot. I was directly below him. He fell full force onto me. I braced and could barely keep my footing, but I was totally unable to catch him. He hurtled down over the edge.
In shock, Kukuczka continued the descent alone. He was so addled that, as he approached the Korean tents, he later related, “I was under the strange illusion that somehow I might see Tadeusz there alive.”
The tents were unoccupied. Kukuczka found a radio, but its batteries were dead. “There was a little gas cookstove and I drank and ate,” he would recall. “Then I fell into a deep sleep and woke up the following afternoon. I had slept for 20 hours.”
Two days later, Kukuczka reached the Godwin Austen Glacier and stumbled back to base camp. He had survived only because, at the time, he was probably the strongest high-altitude climber in the world.
As a feat of sheer gutsy climbing and endurance, I can admire Jerzy Kukuczka’s ascent of the south face and his skin-of-the-teeth descent. But what he did on K2 went so far beyond the boundaries of what I would ever attempt on an 8,000er that I can’t even imagine participating in such a climb. My guess is that the reason Piotrowski’s crampons came off is that he was too tired, or his fingers were too numb, to tighten the straps properly. We know that he was not wearing the newfangled clip-on crampons but an old-fashioned strap-on pair. If the straps are cinched tight, those are actually less likely to twist off than clipons.
Like so many other Poles in the high mountains, Kukuczka had stuck his neck way, way out there—and gotten away with it. And sadly, like so many great climbers who take risk to the ultimate, he would cut his margin too thin only three years later, on the south face of Lhotse.
The joy Kukuczka had felt on the summit (“We were both ecstatic,” he recalled) was canceled by the loss of his partner. “My experiences on that mountain were too tragic,” he later noted, ending his account, “and the price we paid for victory was too high.”
At base camp Kukuczka embraced Wanda Rutkiewicz. Stunned by the death of Piotrowski, one of her dearest friends, she at last abandoned her own plan—despite her frostbitten fingers—to try Broad Peak that summer.
Meanwhile, Renato Casarotto was attempting the Magic Line solo. His wife, Goretta, who had climbed Gasherbrum II with him the year before, served on K2 in effect as his base camp manager. The two were in radio contact several times each day.
Casarotto was motivated by a personal vendetta as well as by the aesthetic appeal of the Magic Line. He had been a member of Reinhold Messner’s 1979 K2 expedition, on which he had not performed well. What should have been a private disappointment became a public humiliation when Messner disparaged Casarotto in his book about K2: “I invited Renato Casarotto because I believed him at the time to be one of the ablest European climbers…. [But] I felt let down … by Renato as a climber.” And according to Jim Curran, at a meeting of high-altitude climbers in the Tyrol in 1985, when someone told him about Casarotto’s ambitions for the next summer, Messner spat, “He’ll never make it!”
In 1986, Casarotto went after his monumental goal with admirable cautiousness. On two attempts, he reached 26,900 feet before turning back because of weather and dangerous conditions. In mid-July, he made his third attempt. This time he got above 27,000 feet, but ferocious winds once again defeated him. Kurt Diemberger, who was close friends with the Casarottos, overheard a radio conversation from that third attempt, which he quoted in The Endless Knot:
GORETTA: How are you feeling, Renato?
RENATO: I’m OK … fine, really. So far. But I’m tired now. and so fed up