K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [22]
Not every Himalayan mountaineer feels the same way. The legendary British climber Don Whillans was famous for letting himself go between expeditions, drinking heavily and eating so much he actually got fat. On the hike in to his next objective, his own porters sometimes teased Whillans about how out of shape and overweight he was. Amazingly, on the mountain he always rounded into form. He reached the summit on one of the greatest expeditions in Himalayan history—the south face of Annapurna in 1970—and he was one of the strongest climbers on the pathbreaking attempts on the southwest face of Everest in the early 1970s. On the other hand, Whillans died of a heart attack at the age of only fifty-two. His lifestyle almost certainly contributed to his early death.
Right from the start on K2, my training paid off. Even in my diary, I’m not comfortable bragging about being fitter than other guys on a climb, but some of my entries make it pretty clear that that’s what was going on. On July 2, I wrote:
We had planned to finish fixing all the way to C II today. Everyone was slow today, so I grabbed 3 ropes and started out by 6:45 A.M. Had to re-break trail to our high point of last eve. Got there by 8:30. Everyone was still way back so I started stringing rope on my own…. Fun, 3rd class stuff.
Rob [Hall] finally caught up but was going slow so I kept leading out.
Scott typically didn’t train as hard as I did, but he had tremendous natural stamina. The genes he was born with enabled him to look like Captain America without really having to work too hard at it. He also had the distractions of a family and a business, which limited his workout time. As early as June 26, I wrote, “It was fun to climb with Scott today. He’s super strong, competent and easy-going. I hope we summit together.”
From the start, as it turned out, Scott and I were slightly stronger than Hall & Ball. And they were planning to use supplemental oxygen up high; Scott and I were not. Still, we felt a huge respect for these likable veterans, and I was thrilled to work hand in hand with them. Their previous knowledge of the route was invaluable. On July 1, Scott and I reached Camp I before Hall & Ball and set up our tent. From my diary: “We left a bomber site for the Kiwis just to be nice & diplomatic. Otherwise it looks like we’re racing each other up the mountain just for good tent sites.” Usually, when you get to a camp—especially on a route like the Abruzzi, where there are so few good platforms—you grab the best site you can find and claim it with your tent. Instead, Scott and I deliberately left the best platform for Rob and Gary, just so they wouldn’t think we were being hypercompetitive about getting up the mountain first.
At about 21,500 feet on the Abruzzi, you encounter the first real technical obstacle on the route. It’s an 80-foot-tall fissure that splits a nearly vertical rock cliff; in the back of the fissure there’s usually a narrow gully of hard ice. The pitch is called “House’s Chimney,” after Bill House, the American who first climbed it in 1938. It took House two and a half hours of desperate struggle to get up the chimney, which forms the crux of the route all the way up to the Shoulder, at 26,000 feet.
According to Jim Curran:
In 1980 Peter Boardman, arguably Britain’s best Himalayan climber at the time, climbed House’s Chimney and was impressed and surprised at its technical difficulty. He thought that when it was first climbed it must have been the hardest pitch in the Himalaya. Certainly it was far harder than anything climbed on Everest in the 1920s and 1930s.
As it turned out, on July 2 Scott and I were the first climbers from our team to reach the base of House’s Chimney. One of us would get to lead it, going first on the rope and placing “protection” to shorten a possible fall. Then, once the leader had climbed the pitch, he’d string fixed ropes