K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [148]
During the night, the storm eased up, and the climbers prepared to make their getaway in the morning. At first light, however, as Diemberger later wrote, “there was no visibility…. With only the one line of escape, the risk of getting lost in thick fog or cloud on the Shoulder was great.” So the climbers stayed put.
In my view, this is a crucial passage. It’s startling that in all the subsequent discussion of the 1986 disaster, no one brought up the question of willow wands. That was the first thing that leapt to my attention when I read The Endless Knot and K2: Triumph and Tragedy before my 1992 expedition. Had the climbers wanded the route between the top of the fixed ropes and Camp IV, they could have managed to get down on August 7, whiteout or no. But neither Curran nor Diemberger even mentions this oversight as contributing to the tragedy.
There’s a curious passage much earlier in Diemberger’s book, however, that illuminates the thinking of the “Europeans.” On the way up to the Shoulder on August 2, he remarks, “I notice that only one of the bamboo sticks the high-altitude porters have brought up bears a red pennant; the other marker flags have either been lost during the transport along the ridge or have not yet been fixed. No time to sort that out now.”
The porters, of course, were Pakistanis working for the Korean expedition. Why didn’t it occur to Diemberger and Tullis, or Rouse and Mrufka, or the three Austrians to bring and plant their own willow wands? That’s porters’ work, Diemberger seems to imply. Even more curiously, on that crucial slope below the Shoulder, the Austrian comes across a cached bundle of wands but declines to pick them up. He recalls, “I look at the bundle thoughtfully: they’re no protection against avalanches, that’s for sure. To put them in now, so near to the end of our time here, seems pedantic, an over-scrupulous precaution.”
Of course willow wands are no protection against avalanches! That’s not what they’re for. When I first read that passage, I wondered how such an experienced mountaineer as Diemberger could have been so blasé about willow wands. Now I realize, as I said earlier, that’s it’s just not chic for Europeans to climb with those garden stakes sticking out of their packs. And the same goes for Brits: unlike Americans, they have little or no tradition of wanding routes in the great ranges to safeguard a descent in a storm.
Thus on August 7, the climbers at Camp IV decided against going down in the whiteout for fear of getting lost. It makes you want to weep with frustration: a string of willow wands below Camp IV could have saved lives.
On the morning of August 8, Diemberger awoke to hear Bauer’s voice over the wind. At first he could not make out the words. He called back for clarification.
“Kurt!” Bauer shouted. “Julie died last night.”
“It was like a hammer blow,” Diemberger later wrote. “Alan, at my side, tried to comfort me. I heard his words without grasping their meaning.”
Bauer carried Tullis’s body to the abandoned tent, cut a hole in the roof with his ax, and deposited the corpse inside it. As heartless as that may seem, it was obviously preferable to keeping a dead body in the cramped Austrian tent.
That same day, August 8, the stranded climbers ran out of stove fuel. They could no longer turn snow into pots of life-saving water. They tried to scoop handfuls of snow and melt them in their mouths. Many a person dying of thirst in the cold has tried to do the same, but it’s a desperate remedy that doesn’t really work, because the loss of precious energy in melting the snow outweighs the minimal gain of liquid.
Meanwhile, Al Rouse, who had been the strongest of the seven, began to fade. Diemberger recalled,
Last night was bad, he was thrashing about, agitated, like a chained animal. He would lunge suddenly, delirious, quarreling with destiny. I tried in vain to calm him…. He begs continuously for water, which we no longer have. I put a piece of