K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [17]
All kinds of commentators shared the Times editor’s sentiments in the wake of 2008’s K2 disaster. There was also a widespread determination to pinpoint the supposed “villains” of the story. If we could only identify the cause of the tragedy, these armchair judges implied, we could fix it so it wouldn’t happen again.
I’m afraid I just don’t see things that way. About arriving on the summit as late as 7:00 P.M., for instance, I have no trouble saying that I’d never do that. But that doesn’t mean that I can tell other climbers what to do. In mountaineering, right and wrong aren’t black-and-white. For every “rule” you might try to apply to our pastime, you can come up with a classic example of some daring alpinist who flagrantly violated it, and in the process became a legend. In 1953 on Nanga Parbat, according to the wisdom of the day, the Austrian climber Hermann Buhl should never have gone for the summit alone. He should have turned around rather than reach the top as late as 7:00 P.M. Above all, he should not have let himself get so strung out that he would have to bivouac on a ledge so tiny he couldn’t even sit down on it. But Buhl did all of the above, and although he lost toes to frostbite, by making the only first ascent of an 8,000er ever to be accomplished solo, he immortalized his deed as one of the boldest climbs ever performed in the Himalaya.
Suppose you did try to establish rules about climbing on Everest or K2. What committee would enforce them? What gatekeeper is going to stand at base camp and say, “Okay, you can head on up the mountain. Nope, you better turn around and go home.” Suppose the American Alpine Club tried to tell Nepal or Pakistan that they ought to limit the number of permits they give to expeditions every year or screen the applicants for competence. Forget it—those impoverished countries make serious amounts of money from expedition permits. Who are we to tell them how to run their business? In 2008, when the Chinese government cleared all other climbers off the north (Tibetan) side of Everest so that they could carry the Olympic torch over the summit, and even persuaded Nepal to make radical restrictions on the south side of the mountain, a lot of Western climbers got pretty pissed off. But the real victims were the Sherpa. By now, a significant portion of the whole Sherpa economy depends on the spring and fall seasons on Everest. A Sherpa who goes high to carry loads, fix ropes, and establish camps for American or German or Korean climbers can earn from a single expedition most of the yearly income that supports himself and his family. You didn’t read much about it in the newspapers, amid all the coverage of protests in Paris and San Francisco and Lhasa, but thanks to Chinese arrogance, in 2008 a lot of Sherpa people were hit hard by the financial backlash.
As for disasters: we can’t stop the kind of catastrophe that played out on K2 in August 2008 from happening again. We shouldn’t even try.
Paradoxically, the glory of mountaineering has everything to do with this state of affairs. Climbing is about freedom. There’s no prize money; there are no gold medals. The mountains are all about going there to do what you want to do. That’s why I’ll never tell anyone else how to climb. All I can say is, This is how I prefer to do it.
These feelings, which are central to my philosophy of mountaineering, rose to the surface not only in the aftermath of 2008’s disaster on K2, but as that tragedy made me think all over again about my own expedition to the world’s second-highest mountain in 1992. Among all my thirty expeditions to the 8,000ers, I feel now, the K2 campaign was the one most marked by ecstatic highs alternating with abysmal lows. And it was also morally the most complicated.
That expedition was a roller-coaster ride of a learning experience for me, but I was young, ambitious, and hungry for any type of opportunity. That’s why I was willing to accept and suffer all the difficulties that were thrown into my path.
Scott Fischer and I would