K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [155]
The ultimate barrier on K2, I think, is psychological. If you’ve been fortunate enough to hold the holy grail of mountaineering briefly in your hands, you don’t want to get greedy and try to take it home with you. If you do, as with Sir Gawain and Sir Lancelot in the Arthurian legend, only bad things will happen.
In recent years, there’s been gloomy talk about whether K2 will soon be “trivialized” the way Everest has been. The South Col route on Everest is now usually strung every spring with fixed ropes, in a continuous chain from advance base camp to the summit. That hasn’t happened yet on the Abruzzi Ridge on K2, but there’s no saying it couldn’t sometime soon. The expectations of last year’s climbers that the Bottleneck and the traverse at the top of it had to be strung with fixed ropes indicates a huge mental shift from the 1990s.
A few paying clients have gone on K2 expeditions in recent years. As far as I know, none has gotten to the summit. But the gloomy observers predict a future in which guide services will charge affluent wannabes big bucks to be hauled up the Abruzzi. If those outfits hire Sherpa or Hunzas to fix the ropes and pitch the camps, and if they routinely use supplemental oxygen, then K2 will move toward the situation Everest is now in. Fixed ropes are the linchpin for commercial guiding, for if a client only has to slide his jumar up one rope after another, rather than actually climb the rock and ice, a formidable challenge is reduced to a treadmill test of stamina. It’s inevitable, I think, that companies will try to commercialize K2, especially now that it’s becoming a “sexier” prize than Everest. And that will be a sad day for mountaineering.
Another recent trend on Everest is the bagging of “firsts” that range from the monumental to the absurd. For the critics, this is one more measure of the mountain’s trivialization. The first winter ascent, the first descent by ski and by snowboard, even the first descent by parapente represented truly skillful and extreme deeds. But within the last ten years, Everest has been climbed by a blind man, by a double amputee, by a seventy-one-year-old man, and by a fifteen-year-old Sherpa. The speed record for Everest keeps getting ratcheted downward.
It frightens me when I hear from people who say they want to be the first this or the first that on Everest; often they ask for my endorsement. Those are not good reasons to climb the mountain, so I always decline. These folks obviously hope to garner attention, rather than just to be on the mountain for the joy of the experience. Climbing the mountain for its own sake should be reason enough to go there.
Still, the firsts continue to proliferate. It’s gotten so that Everest expeditions in search of sponsors will cook up “firsts” so arcane that any experienced climber would laugh at them—except that they seem to be effective fund-raising gimmicks. Such developments may be in the cards for K2, but I wonder. Skiing down the mountain, for instance, strikes me as extremely difficult and scary but conceivable. Who knows what the next generation will pull off? Indeed, in 2001, the great Tyrolean climber Hans Kammerlander planned to ski down the Abruzzi after a solo ascent. But after teaming up with J.-C. Lafaille to struggle up the route in hideous conditions, he changed his mind about strapping on his skis for the descent.
In 1980, a Polish expedition accomplished the first winter ascent of Everest, as Krzysztof Wielicki and Leszek Cichy reached the top by the South Col route on February 17. This was a genuine landmark, one of the great feats in Everest history. So far, there have been two attempts on K2 in winter, both by Polish teams, in 1987 and 2003. The second effort, led by Wielicki, fought to an altitude of 25,000 feet on the Abruzzi Ridge before throwing in the towel. I suspect that this tantalizing “first” will be