K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [34]
My diary entry that day is a testament to uneasiness:
Tried again last night & no go. Still funky weather. Barely eating. We either go up tonight or bail down tomorrow….
Weather is OK. Not great. Cloudy, no wind, poor visibility. We seem to be at the top edge of clouds. Very anxious. Tonight we must go up or go down tomorrow & start all over—ugh! I want to get this over with! We snooze all day like coon-hounds. Dreaming of food—salad, beer, pizza.
That line about going down and starting all over again, I now realize, was pure rationalization. All five of us knew this was going to be our last chance that summer to climb K2.
On August 16, Scott and I were up at midnight. It was still cloudy, but calm, so we decided to go for it. Breakfast was a cup of coffee apiece. Altitude deprives you of hunger, and forcing yourself to eat can stir up waves of nausea. It’s one of the paradoxes of high-altitude climbing that even though you are burning thousands of calories each day, you simply cannot get enough back into your system to balance things out.
We had slept in our down suits, so it was just a matter of putting on boots, overboots, harnesses, mittens, hats, goggles, and headlamps. Ice that had coated the inside walls of our confining tent showered us as we tried not to elbow each other. Finally we were out the door. We strapped on our crampons and were moving by 1:30 A.M. Charley didn’t get off for another hour, and Rob and Gary were even further behind.
I wasn’t carrying a pack, just two liter bottles filled with a powdered energy drink; in my chest pockets I’d stuck a couple of Power Bars. I also carried a spare pair of mittens, a camera, and extra headlamp batteries. Scott and I were roped together with our fifty-foot line, in anticipation of the crevasses that we knew lay above.
The slope gradually steepened as we headed up into the mouth of the Bottleneck. We kicked steps in the firm snow, inclined at a 45-degree angle. Following in our tracks, Charley caught up to us in the Bottleneck. During the whole expedition so far, Scott and I had scarcely climbed with Charley, but in that instant he became our partner. We managed to tie in all three of us on that fifty-foot rope, which was almost absurd, yet roping up together gave us a certain feeling of security.
Near the top of the Bottleneck, the snow conditions worsened, alternating deep, soft powder with a scary breakable crust. We swapped leads often.
We’d been climbing for two hours before we finally saw Rob and Gary’s headlamps as they left Camp IV. Despite that late start, and despite using supplemental oxygen, they were moving very slowly. Was something wrong?
At the top of the Bottleneck, we began the leftward traverse, the crux of the whole route. Vlad had fixed a 150-foot rope here on August 1, and it was still in place—the single fixed rope on the mountain above Camp IV. It was anchored, with a pair of ice screws, only at either end, so if you came off in the middle of the traverse, you’d take a horrendous yo-yo plunge before the stretchy nylon rope would catch you—assuming that neither of the anchors pulled. All the same, we clipped in to the rope and used it like a handrail, counting on what climbers jokingly call “psychological” protection.
The traverse was sketchy. The points of our crampons barely gained purchase on the downward-sloping slabs of rock that lay just beneath the sugary snow. Falling was not an option, but staying attached to the face took all the concentration we could muster.
By shortly after sunrise,