K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [144]
Kurt Diemberger and Julie Tullis had spent most of their time so far on K2 filmmaking for the Italian team to which they were attached. Calling themselves Quota 8000, those climbers had started work on the Magic Line, but after the deaths of Pennington and Smolich, they had bailed and switched over to the Abruzzi. Unlike the British, the Italians claimed they had obtained permits beforehand for both routes, though climbers from other teams were skeptical.
Diemberger and Tullis’s not-so-secret agenda was to climb K2, rather than simply make a film about their teammates. They were an odd pair, the subject of gossip all over the mountain. Tullis, at forty-seven, and Diemberger, at fifty-four, were both married—apparently happily—and Diemberger’s The Endless Knot unabashedly credits the help and goodwill of Terry Tullis and Teresa Diemberger. But when he writes about the bond between himself and Julie, passage after passage reverberates with an intimate passion. For example:
Each step is a step into boundless possibility.
Julie says it more simply: wherever I go, anything is possible.
I say: where anything is possible, there I go.
That’s why we are together.
Or:
If just one of us, as a conclusion of our first years together, reached the summit of K2—wouldn’t that be fulfillment for both? Even if only one trod the dream summit? Only one made the dream come true?
Granted, Diemberger has always been a writer inclined toward the mystical and the emotional. What matters is not whether Diemberger and Tullis were lovers (with or without the knowledge of their spouses) but whether the very emotionality of their relationship, like that newly formed between Rouse and Mrufka, interfered with good judgment on this dangerous mountain.
At first, Jim Curran took a slightly jaundiced view of the Tullis-Diemberger pairing. He had known Tullis for years, though not well, through encounters at climbing meets and festivals in Britain. She struck him as, on the one hand, “a bright, attractive, and apparently conventional housewife” and, on the other, as “a rather bossy ‘head girl.’” He was not at all sure Tullis was ready for K2, for “her actual mountaineering experience was rather limited and certainly had not got the foundation of Scottish winter and extreme alpine climbing,” which the best British alpinists considered mandatory before one tackled the most serious mountains.
Diemberger, whom Curran had also known casually over the years, “radiated a massive self-confidence, amounting at times to self-importance.” But at K2 base camp one day, as Diemberger reminisced about Broad Peak with Hermann Buhl in 1957, Curran was won over by the legend: “I was suddenly conscious that here was a major part of Himalayan climbing history in the flesh.”
The crux of Curran’s analysis of the bond between the British woman and the Austrian man was that Julie, “through her devotion, almost amounting to hero-worship, of Kurt, had come to see herself as a world-class mountaineer in her own right.” And that spelled trouble.
On K2 in 1992, despite my undeniable attraction to Chantal Mauduit, and even as I wondered whether she was flirting with me, I had no intention of getting involved with her during the expedition. My own concentration and commitment, I absolutely believed, depended on having no relationship with another climber that might undercut my motivation or cloud my judgment. All of my energy and focus needed to be on trying to climb K2. Anything less could spell failure or even disaster.
On August 2, Tullis and Diemberger, along with Rouse and Mrufka and three Koreans, all reached the Shoulder, at 26,000 feet. They had been preceded by three Austrians—Willi Bauer, Alfred Imitzer, and Hannes Wieser—who that day were attempting to go for the summit but had to turn back at 27,500