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Tony Streather digs out Camp III after a storm, 1953. © Charles Houston, expedition photograph

BELOW: Walter Bonatti, hero and martyr of the 1954 Italian K2 expedition. © Walter Bonatti Collection

The telltale photo of Lino Lacedelli on K2’s summit, showing the circle of ice particles in the climber’s mustache and beard, evidence that he wore his oxygen mask all the way to the top, 1954. © Fritz Wiessner Collection

A composite photo of Lacedelli and Compagnoni’s signatures with their route to Camp IX and the summit, 1954. © Fritz Wiessner Collection

Epilogue: The Holy Grail

Despite the title of Jim Curran’s book about the 1986 season, in the story of K2, there’s more tragedy than triumph. The first ascents of other 8,000ers unfurled as glorious sagas of perseverance and daring—the French dashing up Annapurna in 1950 after wasting a month simply trying to find the mountain, Hermann Buhl going solo in 1953 to the top of Nanga Parbat, Hillary and Tenzing blithely solving the last obstacles on Everest the same year, Joe Brown and George Band stopping twenty feet short of the top of Kangchenjunga in 1955 out of respect for the beliefs of the people of Sikkim, for whom the mountain was a god and a protector. (Our team did the same on Kangchenjunga in 1989.)

But the first ascent of K2, in 1954, will forever be clouded by the bitter and interminable controversy it spawned. If you believe Walter Bonatti’s version of the events of July 30 and 31—and by now, most people in the climbing world do accept that version—the dominant character in the summit duo, Achille Compagnoni, must go down in history as one of the indelible bad guys of mountaineering. For fear of sharing the triumph with the younger, better climber, Compagnoni was apparently willing to let Bonatti and Amir Mahdi freeze to death in an open bivouac. And the premeditated ruse Compagnoni devised to prevent that sharing—hiding Camp IX behind rocks above a dangerous traverse—turned the bravest Hunza climber of his day into a frostbite victim who would never be able to go back to the high mountains.

The heroes of K2—for me, the list is headed by Bonatti, Fritz Wiessner, and the whole 1953 American team—remain men lastingly scarred by defeat and, in the cases of Bonatti and Wiessner, by betrayal. Toward the end of Curran’s book, he tries to enumerate the triumphs of the 1986 season: Wanda Rutkiewicz becoming the first woman to climb K2, Benoît Chamoux’s dazzling twenty-three-hour ascent, the Poles claiming the Magic Line after it had turned back others—but those deeds are so far overshadowed by the thirteen deaths that 1986 will forever figure as a black season in the annals of mountaineering in the Karakoram.

Ever since Bob Bates and Charlie Houston wrote their classic narrative of the 1953 campaign, “the savage mountain” has become the sobriquet that has stuck to K2. John Barry and Jim Curran (in his historical survey) incorporated that label in the titles of their own K2 books. Last summer, the nickname recurrently appeared in the media accounts of the 2008 disaster.

It doesn’t work for me, though. K2 is not some malevolent being, lurking there above the Baltoro, waiting to get us. It’s just there. It’s indifferent. It’s an inanimate mountain made of rock, ice, and snow. The “savageness” is what we project onto it, as if we blame the peak for our own misadventures on it.

There’s no denying how dangerous a mountain K2 is, however. According to the website EverestNews.com, in 2008 alone at least 290 climbers reached the top of Mount Everest, while only 1 person died on the mountain. No fewer than 77 men and women topped out on a single day in late May. On K2 that summer, 18 climbers reached the summit, while 11 died trying. According to the most accurate count, by May 2009, 299 people have stood on top of K2, while 77 have died on its flanks. That’s a pretty daunting ratio—it means that for every 4 climbers who reach the summit, at least 1 dies. (The ratio for Everest is roughly 19 to 1.)

Those cold statistics mask a discrepancy that only further underscores