K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [31]
The next night, the Russians and Chantal celebrated their victory. Scott and I weren’t invited, so we lay in our own tents listening to their drunken cheers and toasts. That was hard enough to take, but not nearly as hard as the bombshell that exploded in the morning.
Vlad gathered his “team” in the cooking tent at breakfast. Then he announced that the expedition was over! Everyone on his permit would now have to go home. And as if that edict weren’t severe enough, he decided to insult the rest of us for good measure. We Americans, he announced witheringly, just didn’t climb fast enough. We had wasted our time and weren’t willing to push it.
I simply stared at Vlad. I was so angry, I couldn’t get a single word out. I couldn’t remember ever being so pissed off at a fellow climber on a mountain. I couldn’t believe that a so-called leader could be so selfish. If we needed any further proof that Vlad, in the end, was a complete jerk, he had just provided it.
By August 7, Scott and I had been on the mountain for nearly seven weeks. There were five of us on the Russian permit who still dearly wanted another crack at climbing K2. And there was another team still at base camp—Hall & Ball, with their Swedish and Mexican teammates. After so much effort, I wasn’t about to give up just because Vlad had told us to go home.
Chantal, of course, had ignored the whole permit business after her Swiss team had packed it in. She had climbed the mountain illegally and had apparently gotten away with it. That wasn’t my style, however; I’ve always pretty much played by the rules. And I knew that other climbers who had tried to circumvent permit restrictions had been banned from Pakistan by the Ministry of Tourism.
Since our leader, Vlad, was leaving, technically our expedition was over and all of us had to leave as well. But, working with Hall & Ball and our liaison officer, we eventually cobbled together an arrangement that allowed us to stay on the mountain. Dan Mazur, one of our five determined to give it another shot, became the nominal leader of what was left of our party.
Meanwhile, the weather refused to cooperate. Day after day, we saw fierce storms raking the upper slopes of the mountain. Scott and I had left all our gear at Camp III. But now we started to worry that Camp IV, on the Shoulder, could have been buried under new snow or destroyed by the winds that we had seen scouring the upper reaches of the mountain. Instead of counting on the tents and gear left by others at Camp IV, we’d have to pack up Camp III and carry it up to the Shoulder.
We rested at base camp for four days. I was preoccupied with logistics. On August 10, I wrote in my diary:
Scott & I have all of our own stuff @ CIII—tent, bags, fuel, stove, food. Last trip up we ate like sparrows—granola for breakfast, 2 power bars during the day & soup for dinner. We gave up on hot drinks because it took too much time to cook on the Bleuet stove….
We could do it in 3 days if conditions were right. If not deep snow. Base to CIII, to CIV, to summit. Please give us some good weather!
It wasn’t until August 11 that the weather cleared. We all decided to head up the mountain the next day. After all our waiting, all our setbacks, all the interpersonal conflicts, I was supermotivated. You can see the tension in my very handwriting in my diary, and in my use of exclamation marks:
We are going to CIII tomorrow. Scott, me, Gary & Rob will leave here at 2 A.M…. Many will follow. But most of the rest haven’t even been above CII yet! Plus they will carry O’s [bottled oxygen]. It