K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [146]
Suddenly they came upon Mrufka, leaning immobile against the slope. To their shock, they saw that the Polish woman was asleep. Diemberger woke her up and offered her a candy. “She reacts with alarm, looking up full of surprise,” he later wrote. “‘No … Up … I have to go up!” As Diemberger and Tullis continued on, Mrufka put on a burst of speed and tried to pass them. Tullis suggested that she follow in their tracks, for she was clearly half out of her mind, but Mrufka blurted out, “I don’t want to climb behind an old man.”
For long moments, Mrufka flailed away clumsily on the steep slope above Diemberger and Tullis, who were terrified that she would fall and knock them off their feet, or snag their rope and pull them off. Eventually Mrufka passed out of sight to the right.
At 4:00 P.M., Bauer and Imitzer suddenly appeared, heading down. Diemberger recounted their conversation.
“Are you sure you still want to go up?” Bauer asked him.
“It shouldn’t take us more than an hour at most,” he replied.
“You’re wrong. It took us four hours!”
Diemberger could not believe what he was hearing. Finally he deduced that Bauer meant four hours from the top of the traverse out of the Bottleneck, not from their present position. (It sounds as though no one was thinking very clearly that day high on K2.) Reassured by this rationalization, Diemberger and Tullis pushed on, violating their own turnaround deadline. But first Diemberger asked Bauer, “Are there any crevasses where you can bivouac?”
Diemberger was indisputably a world-class mountaineer, but he was also fifty-four years old. I suspect that he and Tullis wanted the summit too badly, and that the “endless knot” of their interwoven partnership, combined with hypoxia, goaded them into making the foolish decision to push on. In their situation, no matter how much I might have craved the summit, if it was after 4:00 P.M. I would have given it up and descended.
My own turnaround time is an inflexible 2:00 P.M. I’ve never violated that deadline. And I’ve never had to stop and turn back because it got too late. It’s all about planning beforehand and starting early enough in the day. Too many times I’ve seen climbers invite trouble just by leaving for the top too late in the morning.
Diemberger and Tullis reached the summit at 5:30 P.M. In The Endless Knot, he recalls that triumph:
The joy! The happiness! We cling to one another. For this one moment of eternity, K2—beautiful K2—is ours.
“Julie—the peak we most desired!” I feel my voice trembling as I look into the big, dark eyes under the hood….
“Our very special mountain,” she whispers. It is, it is—our own and very special mountain.
This sounds like the perfect recipe for an unfolding disaster. But the most extraordinary thing about the summit push on August 4, 1986, is that all seven climbers made it back to Camp IV in one piece. On his way down from the top, Rouse found Mrufka still inching her way painfully upward. After a heated argument, he persuaded her to turn around and descend. At Camp IV, Willi Bauer said later, “She cried in her tent because she hadn’t made it to the top…. I told her, ‘Mrufka, be happy that we’re alive.’”
Diemberger and Tullis did not leave the summit until after 6:00 P.M. By then, the weather was deteriorating. All the way down, Tullis was near collapse. Diemberger went first on the rope to find the route. Suddenly he heard her call out his name: she had fallen and was cartwheeling down the steep slope. Diemberger plunged his ax in, put his weight on the head, and almost stopped her fall before he was wrenched from his stance by the rope. The two fell several hundred feet, out of control, before miraculously sliding to a stop.
The only headlamp the pair carried had failed to work. In the dark, with a belay from his partner, feeling more than seeing his way, Diemberger climbed into a crevasse to scout it for a bivouac site, only to discover