K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [145]
On August 3, the Koreans set out for the summit. They reached it late in the afternoon and were overtaken by night on the descent. Two of the Koreans regained Camp IV, while the third survived a bivouac above the Bottleneck, having tied himself off to a piton. (That same night the three Poles who had made the first ascent of the Magic Line came down the Abruzzi, only to lose Wojciech Wróż in the darkness.)
Later, many would wonder why the “Europeans” (Brits are not, strictly speaking, Europeans)—Tullis and Diemberger, Rouse and Mrufka, and the three Austrians—didn’t go for the summit with the Koreans on August 3, while the weather was still fine. The vague explanation offered by the survivors was that they needed a day of rest and wanted to avoid a traffic jam in the Bottleneck. Another factor may have been that, of all the teams on the mountain that summer, the Koreans were felt to be climbing in the poorest style. Using old-fashioned heavy logistics, their nineteen-man team had strung the route with fixed ropes up the Bottleneck and across the leftward traverse above it. On August 3, the three summiteers used bottled oxygen all the way, the only climbers that season to rely on gas. Yet the Koreans survived where others did not.
With the addition of the two Poles from the Magic Line, the tent situation at Camp IV on the night of August 3 became drastic. Showing remarkable magnanimity, Rouse let the Poles move in with him and Mrufka, even though that meant that he spent the night halfway out of the tent, his upper body nestled in a snow hole. The third Austrian moved into the Korean tent. Once again, Diemberger and Tullis refused to accommodate any of the refugees.
In The Endless Knot, though he acknowledges the overcrowding problem, Diemberger never explains why he and Tullis were unwilling to share their tent—in fact, he dances so cleverly around the truth that if you had only his account of the expedition to go by, you’d never uncover that selfishness.
It seems clear that the later debilitation of many of the climbers at Camp IV was partly a result of the miserable nights they spent in crowded tents on August 2 and 3. At 26,000 feet, it’s hard enough to sleep in “normal” quarters, let alone with too many climbers crammed into too small a tent.
On August 4, the seven “Europeans” set out for the top. Rouse and Mrufka were the first out of camp, but they departed only at dawn, not in the middle of the night, as Charley, Scott, and I would do six years later. Despite two nearly sleepless nights, Rouse was the strongest climber among the seven, and in fact he broke trail nearly all the way. Mrufka quickly fell behind. One of the Austrians, Hannes Wieser, turned back a short way above Camp IV. Willi Bauer and Alfred Imitzer caught up with Rouse not far below the summit and took over the trail-breaking. They reached the top at 3:15 P.M., Rouse not long afterward. After two and a half months on the mountain, he had finally claimed the first British ascent of K2.
Tullis and Diemberger had actually set out from Camp IV before the Austrians, but they’d quickly been overtaken by Bauer and Imitzer. The weather was holding perfect. Diemberger’s account of the summit climb in The Endless Knot is so rich in mystical transport that you have to read between the lines to figure out what was going on with Tullis and himself. They climbed roped together, as no one else did,