K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [21]
It would have helped a lot if Vlad had turned out to be a real leader. But from the get-go, Vlad was strictly doing his own thing. He was just not a team player. So without any real plan or structure in place, everybody else started doing his or her own thing as well.
The frustration of taking on more than my share of the work, of having other climbers shirk their responsibilities, and of having no leader who would assign tasks built inside me into a towering resentment. But I kept it all inside; I never blew up and chewed anybody else out. (That’s typical for me, I’m afraid—I tend to avoid overt conflict.)
I didn’t mention this in Shortcuts, but the reason I tried Everest solo the next year was because of my disappointment with the poor teamwork on K2. I’ll always pull my own weight, and I’m happy to pull even more than my weight, as long as others genuinely try to contribute. But after I got back from Pakistan, I said to myself, Look at how much time and energy you wasted on other people. Why not go on an expedition where all that time and energy benefits yourself?
On rereading my diary, I discovered that even before I got to Pakistan, I’d anticipated the underlying problem that would divide our team from within. On June 6, as I sat in JFK airport waiting for my flight to Asia, I wrote:
Hopefully Scott & I will jell and climb as a strong team on K2. There will be a fair amount of attrition from the other team members but that doesn’t surprise or worry me. It’s typical on a long, arduous trip such as this. Scott is built like a brick shithouse and we’ve put a lot of sweat & tears into this, so there is no lack of desire. We haven’t climbed together, but I feel we know each other well enough by now to form a solid, strong team.
By 1992, I already knew that the thoroughness and intensity of preparation you put into an expedition translate directly into commitment on the mountain. Before K2, Scott and I had spent ten months planning, training, and scrounging together the dough to afford our expedition. By the time we got to base camp, we were truly committed, and we were willing to stay as long as we needed to in order to get up the mountain.
The same wasn’t true of all of our American teammates. They were all gung ho at the start, but after a month, some of them lost motivation and started complaining about how hard everything was. Scott and I wanted to say to them, “Of course it’s hard. What did you sign up for?” (In their defense, a few members of our team did have inflexible deadlines by which they had to return to their jobs.)
Climbing an 8,000er is a sufferfest. You need a lot of patience. As it turned out, after forty days on K2, Scott and I weren’t even thinking about going home. I didn’t have a girlfriend then, or a steady job, or any other particular reason to go home. I thought, Hell, I’ll stay here for four months if I have to.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t have my apprehensions about the climb beforehand. Downing a couple of beers at JFK, I wrote:
So many things can happen for better or worse. I just hope we all return safe and can count to 20 using our fingers & toes. With the right weather, good conditions and health, we can climb K2. But it’s gonna be a bitch.
Throughout my eighteen years of attempting 8,000-meter peaks, I’ve always been a stickler for getting into great physical shape before each expedition. I’ve felt that my training during the months prior to a climb would not only increase my chances of success but would make me climb more safely. If I could climb faster and stay strong day after day, I could minimize some of the inevitable risks of exposure on those great peaks. With a bank of endurance stored up, even if something went wrong at