K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [27]
By 1992, only five Americans had climbed K2: Jim Wickwire and his three teammates by the northeast ridge in 1978, and Steve Swenson on the north ridge in 1990. No Americans had yet climbed the Abruzzi. Although that was not a major factor in my motivation, I couldn’t help but realize that I might be part of the first American team to get up the classic line by which K2 had first been climbed in 1954.
On July 29, Thor, Chantal, Neal, and I fought our way back up to CIII. We found it completely buried in snow—there wasn’t even the top of a tent pole sticking out of the drifts. We spent hours digging out the camp. One tent had been completely destroyed; the other was salvageable, but when we repitched it, it was so cramped that it offered room, as I put it in my diary, only “for one and a half people.” I helped Thor and Chantal set up their own tent, then crawled into my coffinlike bivy tent. Neal settled into the tent we had just repitched. Later in the day, Vlad and Gnady arrived from below, climbed through, and eventually camped slightly above us. Alex was also headed up, about a day behind.
It was a miserable night; I didn’t sleep very well, as I had to keep getting up to shovel new snow and spindrift off my shelter. In the morning, the wind was still howling. “Tough decision as to what to do,” I wrote later. “It’s Neal’s last shot but it’s terrible up here. Decided to bail down. Thor & Chantal stayed. Really bad going down.”
From the lower camps, our communication with our “teammates” was limited to a prearranged 7:00 P.M. radio call. These calls were cryptic and frustrating at best, as the Russians translated little of their information for us. Sometimes the Russian chatter droned interminably on and we simply gave up listening, since we seemed to be excluded anyway. On July 31, those of us back in base camp waited nervously. Finally we got some news. “Vlad [and Gnady] made it to bottom of summit pyramid,” I recorded in my diary. “Alex is at CIII and Thor is ? Very nice day, but Vlad said snow was chest deep.”
August 1 was another good day on the mountain. I was still biding my time before making my own surge up the mountain. For Neal, any hopes of the summit had been dashed, but by now Scott was back in good shape and ready to charge. That day, we knew, Vlad and Gnady were going for the top. Forty-one days after I’d arrived at base camp, somebody from our team was finally making a serious assault.
Yet 7:00 P.M. came and went with no radio call from the summit pair. Granted, I had never formed any close friendships with the Russians, and Vlad had really ticked me off with his every-man-for-himself philosophy. That day, however, I couldn’t help but worry about what was going on high on K2, as I silently pleaded with the mountain gods to be kind to those two determined climbers. We all tried to send positive energy their way.
Finally we found out what had happened. Vlad and Gnady had left Camp IV, pitched on the Shoulder at 26,000 feet, at 3:00 A.M. Hindered by deep snow, they had climbed agonizingly slowly, but they’d refused to turn around. They’d reached the summit together at 9:00 P.M., after eighteen hours of climbing.
When I found this out, I was astounded and disturbed. In my book, eighteen hours was far too long to keep going for the summit, and 9:00 P.M. was far too late to get there. But these were really tough guys. Did I think I could climb any faster? On my own summit attempt, what could I do differently? “Should we leave CIV @ 8 P.M.?” I mused in my diary. “Gonna be a bitch!”
That night, Gnady made it down to Camp IV, but Vlad bivouacked, exhausted, below the summit. Remarkably, he not only survived the night but suffered no frostbite. The two Russians descended all the way to base camp on August 3.
Meanwhile, on August 2, Thor, Chantal, and Alex had climbed to the Shoulder and set up their own camp at 26,000 feet. Their plan was to go for the summit in the morning.
The same day they