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“I’ve lost Julie,” he answered.

Later Curran wrote,

If you had lined up every member of each expedition and asked yourself who would survive an ordeal like this, Willi and Kurt would come at the bottom of most people’s lists. But in the end their slow, plodding, energy-conserving approach must have paid off.

Of the seven climbers who had headed for the summit on August 4, five had perished. The toll for the “dangerous summer” had reached thirteen.

To this day, in the long annals of mountaineering in the Himalaya and the Karakoram, only one season on any peak has ever been more deadly than K2 in 1986. In 1937 on Nanga Parbat, seven German climbers and nine high-altitude porters were crushed to death by a monstrous avalanche as they slept in their tents at Camp IV. That calamity, however, occurred in a single instant, as a result of a collapse of a hanging glacier far above—an act of God, as it were. In terms of a season punctuated by one unrelated disaster after another, snuffing out the lives of some of the world’s best mountaineers, K2 in 1986 remains unmatched.

The terrible summer had its impact in mountaineering circles in the United States, though it did not really reverberate among the general public. For one thing, “only” two of the thirteen victims were Americans. The hue and cry in this country about the Everest tragedy of 1996 had everything to do with how many of the principals involved, from Scott Fischer to Beck Weathers to Doug Hansen to Jon Krakauer, were Americans. And though K2 had an able chronicler in Jim Curran, the British writer did not play a pivotal role in the drama, as Krakauer did on Everest. Finally, on K2 there was no simple morality play to which the public could reduce the complicated chain of accidents—nothing like the perversely satisfying “they got what they deserved” formula so many readers took away from Into Thin Air.

A lead article in the American Alpine Journal by Charlie Houston, titled “Death in High Places,” tried to wring a moral lesson from the 1986 season. Among other criticisms, Houston wrote,

Too many of the deaths were avoidable….

Also commonplace were outrageous behavior, intense rivalry, and disregard of mountain ethics—which caused several deaths. Not many years ago some of the things that were done would have led to excommunication by the climbing fraternity.

Houston’s strictures were among the first in a vein that has now become commonplace, especially in response to the “circuses” on Everest every spring, as selfishness, competition, and dehumanization overwhelm compassion and brotherhood.

The most balanced and comprehensive coverage of the K2 tragedies in the American media came in an article in Outside magazine titled “The Dangerous Summer,” cowritten by Greg Child (four years before he would climb K2) and Jon Krakauer (ten years before he would climb Everest). For the most part, Child and Krakauer avoided finger-pointing, but they ended the piece with a quote they had elicited from Jim Curran:

“If anything was common to most of the deaths, it was that a lot of people were very ambitious and had a lot to gain by climbing K2—and a lot to lose as well. Casarotto, the Austrians, Al Rouse, the Barrards were all—the word that comes to mind is overambitious. If you’re going to try alpine-style ascents of 8,000-meter peaks, you’ve got to leave yourself room to fail.”

Too many people on K2 last summer, it would appear, did not.

Twenty-two years later, commenting on the 2008 K2 catastrophe for National Geographic Adventure, Child would strike a more sardonic note: “What the hell—climbing is dangerous.”

In Great Britain and Europe, however, the K2 season caused a huge furor. The British press, including some of the climbing journals, raked the Austrians over the coals for “abandoning” Al Rouse. This charge was, of course, ridiculous: by August 10, Rouse was too feeble even to stand, and it was all Diemberger and Bauer could do to get themselves down the mountain. Likewise, British journals and newspapers castigated Diemberger for making