K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [153]
It’s also true, though, that on Everest experienced “professional” climbers make mistakes and get in trouble. In the public eye, all clients get scapegoated as dilettantes who have no business being on the mountain. But many clients, including ones I’ve guided, have been training as amateur climbers for years before they sign up for Everest. In 1996, the clients got most of the blame for the tragedy. Shouldn’t the leaders have absorbed much of the criticism for mistakes that led to the disaster?
In 2004, the French climbing writer Charlie Buffet wrote a deft little book called La Folie du K2 (K2 Madness). In it, he listed the ten French mountaineers who had reached the top of K2 to that date: Éric Escoffier, Daniel Lacroix, Benoît Chamoux, Maurice and Liliane Barrard, Michel Parmentier, Pierre Béghin, Christophe Profit, Chantal Mauduit, and Jean-Christophe Lafaille. That list reads like a Who’s Who of French mountaineering. Laconically, Buffet commented, “At this time, only two of them are still alive, Profit and Lafaille. All the rest died in the mountains.”
Since my great friend J.-C. Lafaille disappeared on Makalu in 2006, that reduces Buffet’s list of the living to one: Christophe Profit, who with Béghin made the first ascent of K2’s northwest ridge in 1991. And with the death of the Frenchman Hugues d’Aubarède in August 2008, Buffet’s roster becomes even more doleful.
Buffet closes his book with a powerful quotation from Lafaille. Since I don’t read French, I’d been unaware of J.-C.’s comments until this year, when a friend translated the passage for me. (In the book, it’s not clear whether J.-C., who got to the top of K2 in 2001, wrote the passage for a climbing magazine or simply spoke it during an interview with Buffet.)
It’s a superb, immense mountain that crushes you. Here the risks are palpable, you can see them. Not far from base camp, there’s this memorial [the Gilkey-Puchoz memorial]. You feel as though you’re in a cemetery. To reach the foot of the [Abruzzi] face, you walk along the Godwin Austen Glacier, where a Spanish friend of mine found the body of Maurice Barrard two years ago. It’s only a fifteen-minute walk from the tents where we lived for two months. And every time that I took that path, I found human debris there—clothes, shoes, a pelvis. The whole history of this mountain lies heavy on your shoulders.
K2 was the greatest adventure of my climbing life. It was the ultimate test of my mountaineering skills. It had everything: close calls, interminable waits during storms, retreats to base camp, desperate rescues of other climbers. I not only needed all my ability to get up the mountain, I needed all my patience. (Sometimes I call K2 the “full meal deal” of mountaineering—everything you could ask for in a climb, and more.) In all of my expeditions to 8,000ers, I’ve never spent so long on a peak before getting to the top. K2 was a lifetime of expeditions packed into one summer.
It was also one of the two or three most important turning points in my life. As I hiked out the Baltoro that August, I could finally say to myself, I really do have the skills to get up the 8,000ers. I’ve climbed the three highest. What about the others? Ultimately, K2 gave me the push and the confidence to conceive of my Endeavor 8000.
By 2008, I’d been on ten expeditions to Mount Everest. I’d reached its summit six times. Ever since 2005, when I finished the cycle of the fourteen 8,000ers by climbing Annapurna, I’d always entertained the thought that, given the right circumstances, I might give Everest another go.
Then, just last spring, the right circumstances fell into place. On March 25, 2009, I set out once more for the world