K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [157]
I’ll never forget peering over the ridge crest on the summit slope on Dhaulagiri in 1999, and suddenly seeing a dead man sprawled in the snow. That was another wake-up call. As I fought down the shiver that crawled up my spine, I vowed, “Ed, if you fuck up, that’ll be you lying there.”
For several years after 1998, there was a macabre mystique about women and K2. By that date, only five women had reached the summit: Wanda Rutkiewicz, Liliane Barrard, Julie Tullis, Chantal Mauduit, and Alison Hargreaves. And by 1998, all five were dead. Barrard and Tullis died descending the Abruzzi in 1986, as did Hargreaves in 1995, when she was apparently blown off the mountain by a tremendous gust of wind. (Hargreaves’s death caused a huge and to my mind ridiculous furor in her native Great Britain, where she was posthumously censured—by the popular press, not the climbing community—for leaving two small children motherless. Any number of male climbers over the decades, including Mallory, have done the same, without being tarred and feathered as irresponsible fathers.) Then Rutkiewicz died on Kangchenjunga in 1992, and Mauduit on Dhaulagiri in 1998.
The fact that no woman alive had climbed K2 sparked a competition among a small sorority of ambitious female alpinists. Jennifer Jordan wrote a popular book called (here we go again!) Savage Summit, chronicling the life stories of the five who had climbed K2 and died. And in 2002, her husband, Jeff Rhoads, organized an expedition to the mountain, while Jordan made a film, called Women of K2, that pivoted around Araceli Segarra’s attempt to become the sixth woman to get up the mountain, thereby breaking what was already being called “the curse of the women of K2.”
Araceli was one of the on-camera stars of David Breashears’s IMAX film about Everest in 1996. She’s a strong climber and a great teammate, and she also happens to be beautiful enough to make a living as a model in her native Spain. Her effort on the Cesen route, however, was turned back by weather and snow conditions at only 23,300 feet. It was on this expedition that Jordan and Rhoads discovered the remains of Dudley Wolfe on the Godwin Austen Glacier.
Despite Araceli’s failure to climb K2, the film won several awards. It also provoked an odd backlash among feminists, who thought that what Jordan was saying was that women simply aren’t good enough to climb K2 safely. She was dumbfounded, since her real point was to dramatize just how dangerous a mountain K2 is, for men as well as for women.
The so-called curse produced a far more opportunistic response than Jordan’s film, when a publicity-hungry American climber named Heidi Howkins published a book called K2: One Woman’s Quest for the Summit, about how she planned to climb K2. Give me a break! Do the climb first, then write the book! Howkins never did get very high on the mountain, but that didn’t prevent National Geographic Explorer from making a film about her self-styled “quest.” It was titled (wouldn’t you know it?) Savage Summits.
As of May 2009, no American woman has yet climbed K2. This is a first that will undoubtedly keep a heated rivalry alive until some female mountaineer from this country pulls off the feat.
Meanwhile, in 2004, a Spanish woman, Edurne Pasabán, quietly ended the curse, as she reached the summit by the Abruzzi Ridge as part of an Italian-Spanish team. At the moment, she stands tied with the Austrian climber Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, both of whom have climbed twelve of the fourteen 8,000ers. Back in the 1980s, a lot of people thought that Wanda Rutkiewicz would be the first woman to join the elite company of men who had completed all fourteen. She was way ahead of any other woman in the world, in terms of 8,000ers on her résumé. But seventeen years after Rutkiewicz’s death, no woman has yet completed the list.
Because they are Europeans, and because they don’t have the kinds of publicity