K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [142]
In the dark, his teammates noticed a “one-meter gap” between the bottom of one fixed rope and the top anchor of the rope below it. They warned each other about the gap, and the first two men reached the bottom end of the last rope without mishap. Only a relatively easy snow slope lay between them and Camp IV, on the Shoulder.
The two men waited for Wróż to join them. The expedition leader later reported, “Suddenly they heard the noise of a fall. They feared the worst, but, exhausted, could do nothing more than to wait.” Wróż never appeared. His partners could not be sure what had happened, but they guessed that Wróż must have rappelled off the end of the rope above the one-meter gap. There was nothing the two men could do but head on down themselves.
At base camp, a bitter argument broke out between the Polish and the Korean team leaders about the placing of the ropes and the one-meter gap. Curran’s view was more philosophical: “The Poles should not have been relying on the Koreans’ fixed ropes in the first place. But when the ropes were there and others were using them, it would be ridiculous to expect them to ignore them, either on purist or practical grounds.”
I think all this blame casting misses a more basic point. What happened to Wróż is what happens to climbers when they’re pushed to the very limit. If you have to call on your last reserves just to get down a mountain, it’s the easiest thing in the world to make a simple mistake, like rappelling off the end of a rope in the dark. In forging the first ascents of the south face and the Magic Line, the Poles proved they were the toughest climbers on the mountain in 1986. But both Wróż and Piotrowski paid for their brilliant conquests with their lives.
Like Kukuczka and Piotrowski, the trio on the Magic Line had climbed a route so difficult, and had so deeply drawn on their reserves of strength, that their only hope for survival was to come down an easier route that had been fixed by others. Some observers see that as cutting-edge alpinism, but for me, it’s leaving too much up to luck. Sometimes you get away with it; sometimes you don’t.
Another eternal verity about the 8,000ers cannot be emphasized too much. In general, more climbers die on the descent of a great mountain than on the ascent. The Poles solved all the extreme technical problems as they fought their way up their breakthrough routes. It was only on the way down the relatively easy Abruzzi Ridge, with almost no gas left in their tanks, that they came to grief. Thus by the second week in August, eight climbers had lost their lives on K2 in a single summer, by far the deadliest toll in the mountain’s history. And yet the worst was still to come.
The British team on the northwest ridge was coming apart at the seams. Besides the leader, Alan Rouse, the team was made up of some of the crème de la crème of British mountaineering: John Barry, John Porter, Brian Hall, and the infamous Burgess twins, Alan and Adrian—hippie iconoclasts who were nonetheless top-notch, quite conservative mountaineers.
As they attacked an unclimbed route on K2, with the prospect of becoming the first Brits to climb the mountain, the team was buoyed by promises of book and film contracts. In the middle of the expedition, the climbers got a letter from the wife of one of their Himalayan cronies back home, informing them that the word was out that the climbers would be knighted by the queen if they got to the top. This was apparently a spoof, but such an honor would not have been inconceivable. After all,