K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [29]
Late that evening, Alex came into sight above Camp III. He was pretty wasted. We climbed up a little way to help him down, got him into a tent, and brewed up lots of drinks, because he was severely dehydrated. It surprised me that at this point, Alex didn’t even seem curious about what was going on with Chantal.
That same day, Thor had started down from Camp IV, leading Chantal, who could barely see her feet in front of her. Because of the marginal conditions, they got only a short distance before having to stop on the lower edge of the Shoulder. Fortunately, Thor had brought a tent, but the emergency shelter he set up on that precarious slope was more like a bivoauc than a true camp. I could only imagine the monumental task he had taking care of Chantal in such trying circumstances.
The next day, August 5, Scott and I got up at 4:30 A.M., then waited for a break in the weather to head back up, since the situation above us seemed to be getting more dire by the hour. Alex was too wiped out to help at all; later that day he would head down from Camp III on his own. Finally the weather improved just enough. Scott and I were off at 7:30. There were clouds scudding by, alternating with sunbursts. The snow everywhere was deep and soft.
By midday, we had reached the last headwall beneath the Shoulder.
Suddenly we caught sight of Thor and Chantal, two small dots above us flickering in and out of clouds and mist. The wind was blowing steadily in a minor gale, and little spindrift avalanches had started sliding down the headwall.
Throughout the expedition so far, I had always erred on the side of caution. I’d refused to climb in conditions the Russians seemed to think were worth the risk. I’d headed down when cockier climbers headed up. Now, all at once, I felt that the slope Scott and I were trying to climb was ready to avalanche. Scott hadn’t yet come to the same realization—I attribute that to the fact that I’d done a lot more guiding than he had and had learned to be hypervigilant about avalanche conditions. “Wait a minute, Scott,” I said. “This is not a good slope.”
It’s an eternal and inevitable fact in mountaineering, as in most dangerous pursuits, that you can get sucked into exceeding the boundaries of your own best judgment of acceptable risk when you go to the rescue of someone else in trouble. The classic example occurred on K2 in 1953, when, trying to save the life of a crippled teammate, seven members of the American expedition came extremely close to dying in one horrible, interlinked fall. That accident had taken place almost exactly where Scott and I now stood.
Later I would think about the sad fate of Jean-Marc Boivin. One of the finest French climbers of his day, he was also, during the 1980s, the boldest extreme skier in the world. Boivin performed scores of first ski descents in the Alps, on couloirs and faces where the slightest slip meant certain death. He also perfected the arts of BASE jumping and para-penting (hang gliding with a frameless parachute that unfurls from a pack on your back). In 1988 he electrified the climbing world by jumping off the summit of Everest and parapenting to a lower camp in only twelve minutes.
In 1990, at the age of thirty-nine, Boivin was starring in a made-for-TV adventure for Ushuaïa, a chic French documentary show about extreme sports. He and a female costar were set to BASE jump off a cliff near Angel Falls, Venezuela—a piece of cake for Boivin. But when the woman, jumping first, hit the cliff glancingly on the way down, Boivin impetuously jumped to go to her aid, without making his usual meticulous preparations. He hit a tree near the bottom of the jump, then lay on the ground, injured. A helicopter flew by to rescue him, but Boivin signaled the pilot to go after his costar first. She survived, miraculously, with only minor injuries. By the time the chopper had returned to gather up Boivin, he had died of internal hemorrhaging. He left