K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [18]
That’s why we ended up buying slots on somebody else’s expedition. We joined a Russian team led by Vladimir Balyberdin, or simply “Vlad,” as everybody called him. On paper, the deal looked like a reasonable quid pro quo: the Russians were eager to sell places on their permit in order to afford the expedition themselves, since what they lacked above all was hard currency. Vlad proved to be a strong climber (like me, he’d already gotten up Everest and Kangchenjunga), but he was a leader in name only. Almost from the start, there were tensions between the Russians and the rest of us who had bought places on the team. The word “team,” in fact, would be an oxymoron that summer.
It was only in 1975 that the Pakistani government caught on to the lucrative trick of selling multiple permits to K2 in a single season. That summer, instead of leasing the mountain only to Americans (as it had in 1953) or Italians (1954), the Ministry of Tourism granted simultaneous permits to teams from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, and Japan. “Throughout the summer,” writes K2 historian Jim Curran, “there was a more or less continuous procession of porters carrying supplies and equipment up the Baltoro Glacier. The result was chaos.
“Porter stages, load sizes, fees, rest days, etc., all became open to negotiation,” Curran elaborates, “and almost every expedition was dogged with strikes, go-slows, and thefts. Some expeditions even failed to reach Base Camp and a vast amount of ill-will was generated.”
By 1992, the authorities had worked out most of the logistical kinks. Porter strikes were not a problem on our approach to base camp. After the chaos of 1975, the Pakistani Ministry of Tourism had established fixed wages for the porters. Foreign climbers had to pay the standardized rates, and the porters had to accept them or go home. On the other hand, when I had to hire my own porters in Askole for the eight-day trek to base camp, I was so poor I could afford only three porters to carry my four loads, so I ended up humping my own sixty-pound pack all the way in.
Our so-called team was disorganized from the start. To save money themselves, the Russians had decided to drive overland all the way to Rawalpindi. They got there long after we Americans did. After cooling our heels for a frustrating week as we waited for the Russians, my teammate Thor Kieser and I decided to snag a last-minute trekking permit and hike in by ourselves. Scott had already left Askole with his own trekking permit, escorting two paying clients to base camp in an effort to fill his nearly empty pockets. Along the way, Thor and I caught up with Scott and his trekkers. By the time we arrived at base camp on June 21, only a five-person Swiss team was on the mountain.
In retrospect, it’s obvious to me that from the very start, our expedition was plagued by stress and frustration. But I was so gung ho at the time that I ignored the distractions. After all our preparations, it was beyond my wildest dreams to be camped beneath the holy grail of mountaineering, and for weeks I floated along on a manic high of enthusiasm and hard work.
Not long ago, I let a friend read my K2 diary. He made an interesting observation. “Ed,” he said, “do you realize that the writing in your diary is far more blunt and critical than anything you write for publication, or anything you say when you give a slide show?”
No, I hadn’t realized. But when I recently reread my dairy, I saw that my friend was right. As I’ve said, the diary was for myself—I never