K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [2]
Now I wonder. Any “story” can be told in dozens of different ways. For that very reason, I believe, every time you go back and reexamine an important chapter in your life, you learn something new about it. And the reactions of audiences when I give slide shows, as well as the e-mails I received from folks who read No Shortcuts to the Top, gave me many new insights into my own experience.
I have always believed that climbing mountains teaches you lessons. And more than that, I firmly believe that those lessons can be applied to the rest of your life. It’s not an easy process, however. Mountaineering literature is full of trite clichés about “conquering an enemy” or “transcending your limits.” For at least two centuries, philosophers of the outdoors have insisted that nature is “a school of character.”
Would that it were all so simple! The most important lesson I learned from K2 was that by simply putting off making a decision, I made the worst decision of my life: to climb on into a gathering storm. I was lucky to survive our summit push on K2. Scott and Charley didn’t agree with me about this. That day, they never seemed to suffer from the nagging doubts—the knot in my gut, as I’ve always thought of it—I carried with me hour after hour. Yet my partners’ comparatively blithe attitude about our climbing on that August 16 doesn’t even begin to tempt me to revise my judgment. It’s ultimately a personal thing.
K2 is often called the hardest mountain in the world. It’s also often called the deadliest. This may not be strictly true: in terms of the ratio of climbers who get to the top compared to those who die on the mountain, Annapurna is more deadly than K2. (I succeeded on Annapurna, in fact, only on my third try, in 2005, and only after I’d begun to wonder whether it was too dangerous a peak to justify another attempt. It became my nemesis—the last of all the fourteen 8,000ers I was able to climb.)
Even before I went to K2, however, I had started calling it “the holy grail of mountaineering.” It seemed to me to pose the ultimate challenge in high-altitude climbing. To prepare for that challenge, I read everything I could about K2’s history.
I’ve often puzzled over the fact that the public seems so fixated on Mount Everest. At one point in 1998, there were about ten books published in English by climbers who had been involved in the Everest disaster two years earlier—not just Krakauer’s Into Thin Air but memoirs by such survivors as Beck Weathers, Anatoli Boukreev, Lene Gammelgaard, and Matt Dickinson.
In the chaotic summer of 1986, thirteen climbers died on K2, including several who were among the finest alpinists in the world. That’s five more than died in the 1996 “killer storm” on Everest. Yet only one book chronicling the K2 disaster was published in the United Kingdom or the United States—Jim Curran’s K2: Triumph and Tragedy.
As I did my homework before our 1992 expedition, I couldn’t help comparing Everest’s history to K2’s. The highest mountain in the world has its dramatic stories: Mallory and Irvine disappearing into the clouds in 1924, Hillary and Tenzing’s smooth first ascent in 1953, Messner’s astonishing solo climb without bottled oxygen in 1980, and the like. But taken as a whole, the saga of Everest seems to me a sprawling, even tedious narrative, especially in recent years, now that guided commercial expeditions throng the mountain each spring and fall and as many as five hundred men and women per season claim their fifteen minutes each on the summit.
The history of K2, in contrast, pivots around a few intense and troubled campaigns, separated from each other by years of inactivity or total failure. As I first read about those campaigns, it struck me that