K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [19]
There’s an old and honored tradition in exploration literature that you don’t air your dirty laundry in print. Whatever bickering, name-calling, grudge nursing, and dark funks really took place on the expedition, they’re nobody else’s business. You can read the whole of Sir John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest and never suspect that a single cross word was exchanged by the climbers who supported Hillary and Tenzing’s monumental push to the summit. Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna—the bestselling mountaineering book of all time, and the book that more than any other inspired me as a teenager and made me want to become a climber—characterizes the 1950 French team as an ideal brotherhood, with each member making heroic sacrifices to support the others and, in the end, even to save their lives.
When I learned, about a decade ago, that that wasn’t the whole story, that there had been plenty of conflict and resentment on the first ascent of Annapurna, I felt only slightly dismayed. By then I’d been on enough expeditions to see for myself how interpersonal conflicts and team dynamics play out. The new revelations about Annapurna didn’t change the feelings I’d had decades earlier, when I’d first read Herzog’s book. It still seemed a heroic tale of struggle, camaraderie, sacrifice, and eventual success.
With the counterculture revolution of the late 1960s and the 1970s came a new trend in expedition literature. In the new narratives, the dirty laundry was not only brought out of the closet, it was put on prominent display. No two books more vividly embodied this tell-it-like-it-was aesthetic than Galen Rowell’s In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods and Rick Ridgeway’s The Last Step, which chronicled, respectively, the 1975 and 1978 American K2 expeditions. Rowell and Ridgeway not only highlighted every interpersonal showdown among their teammates, they remembered (or recreated) blistering dialogues to dramatize them. A sample from Ridgeway:
“I just talked to Lou,” Cherie said acidly. “I’m tired of hearing all this stuff about Terry being upset. Everyone whispering behind our backs. You’re all bastards. Bastards, bastards, bastards.”
“Look, we could care less what goes on as long as it doesn’t affect the team and the climb,” John said.
“What do you mean what goes on? I’m sick of all this gossiping,” Cherie started to cry.
After those two books were published, some of the team members—the ones portrayed in the most unfavorable light, of course—felt betrayed. But a younger generation of readers responded with gleeful enthusiasm: So this is what really goes on during expeditions. The elders of our tribe, the traditionalists, were aghast. I read Rowell and Ridgeway’s books when they came out, and I could relate to what they wrote. But I’d never publish the kinds of intimate details from my expeditions that they sprinkled on virtually every page of their books.
The debate persists today, although the tell-all school has gained a comfortable edge. I’ve never been exactly sure where on this spectrum my own views lie, though they’re certainly far to the right (if right is conservative) of Rowell and Ridgeway. Since I’ve never written a book-length account of any of my expeditions, I’ve never had to commit my beliefs on this matter to print. In No Shortcuts to the Top, there were certainly plenty of real antagonisms that I downplayed or even avoided mentioning altogether. At the same time, I’ve sometimes been accused of being too much of a “nice guy,” even of subscribing to that old motherly admonition “If you don