K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [141]
The British team had gathered at base camp upon learning of Casarotto’s demise. Jim Curran wrote, “I mumbled my condolences to Goretta, lost for words.” With dignified control, she answered in English, “Please thank your friends for trying to help to save my husband.”
Is there anything to be learned from Casarotto’s death? Perhaps, after the ordeal of safely descending thousands of feet on the Magic Line, once he reached the glacier, he let down his guard. One of my favorite mountaineering mottos is “Crevasses don’t care if you’re a pro or not.” The crevasse into which Casarotto fell was so narrow on the surface that he could easily have jumped across it. But snow bridges are fiendishly deceptive: they often look exactly like any other harmless patch of glacial surface. If you’re going to try to solo an 8,000er, you almost have to cross crevasses on snow bridges that could collapse under your weight. A number of great mountaineers have died falling into crevasses—including Louis Lachenal, the conqueror of Annapurna, who perished in 1955 on a routine ski descent of the Vallée Blanche above his home town of Chamonix. And ever since my close partner J.-C. Lafaille disappeared high on Makalu on a solo winter attempt in 2006, I’ve thought that his death was most likely caused by his falling into a crevasse. Even a lifetime of climbing experience is no safeguard against a hidden crack in a glacier.
I’ve always been supercautious about crevasses, roping up where other climbers blithely travel solo, as I did on every trip through the funky icefall just below the foot of the Abruzzi Ridge. On my only solo expedition, to the north side of Everest in 1993, I dealt with the crevasses by wearing snowshoes or skis whenever I could, thereby spreading my body weight over a larger surface. I also made sure to climb the glacier only in the predawn cold, when its surface was as hard as it gets. Even so, traveling alone on the glacier was probably the scariest part of the climb, since I had so little control over what might happen.
Some of my climbing friends are astonished to learn that despite all the expeditions I’ve been on, I’ve never fallen into a crevasse. I’ve plunged into holes up to my waist several times, but always caught myself with my arms and managed to extricate myself without breaking loose more of the snow bridge and taking a nasty plunge. (And believe me, the insides of crevasses are nasty places!) The absence of crevasse falls on my mountaineering résumé is partly just sheer luck, but I like to think it’s mainly the result of my healthy respect for those hidden death traps.
The latest tragedy sent shock waves reverberating all over the mountain. As Jim Curran would write:
For many of us the death of Renato Casarotto was the last Straw…. The circumstances were so harrowing that I felt it was surprising that anyone had the willpower to stay on, yet even after six deaths some of us felt that there couldn’t possibly be any more and that going home wouldn’t change anything. And so, as July dragged on and the warm, wet monsoon-like weather kept everyone at Base Camp, the remnants of nine expeditions re-formed and regrouped for one last big effort.
On August 3 and 4, however, two more deaths occurred. One was the result of an almost absurd fluke: Mohammed Ali, the sirdar of the Pakistani high-altitude porters for a Korean team trying the Abruzzi Ridge, was making a routine shuttle between advance base camp and Camp I, on the lowest slopes of the spur, when a falling stone struck him in the head, killing him instantly.
The other accident occurred at the end of yet another epic ascent. After the deaths of Smolich and Pennington on the Magic Line, and of Casarotto on the glacier just below it, another team, made up mostly