K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [35]
All morning, however, a sea of clouds below us had been slowly but steadily rising. At 7:00 A.M., the sea engulfed us. It was still completely calm, and eerily warm—so warm that I took off my hat. But then it started to snow; the big, soft, fluffy flakes quickly grew so thick that I started inhaling them as I panted in the thin air. We were still roped together, because even on the summit snowfield there are crevasses you could fall into. We continued to swap leads as we plowed through the breakable crust.
As we trudged slowly upward in silence, I started calculating. Five hours to the summit, three back down to here—what are conditions going to be like eight hours from now if it keeps snowing? It was then that the knot started to form in my gut. As I later wrote in my diary, I was wondering, “What to do? The prudent thing is to turn back, but we keep going. Stupid? Probably. This is the worst part of climbing big peaks. Spend tons of $ & time to get to this point & you’re faced with this decision.”
Scott and Charley obviously weren’t going through the same kind of agonizing appraisal. When I finally stopped them and asked, “Hey, what do you guys think?,” Scott answered, “Whaddya mean?” and Charlie seconded him: “We’re going up!”
So I kept heading upward, putting off my decision from one half hour to the next. I thought, Why are they comfortable with this and I’m not? Am I a sissy? Do I worry too much? Am I too conservative? All that ambivalence, all that self-questioning just ate away at me, and the knot in my gut grew heavier.
As we got closer to the summit and the falling snow showed no signs of letting up, I knew I was making the greatest mistake of my climbing life. And yet I kept going.
During the seventeen years since K2, I’ve thought long and hard about why I didn’t turn around on August 16, 1992. There was certainly a voice in my head taunting me: What are other people going to say if I go down while Scott and Charley make the summit? Yet today I can honestly state that my partners’ eagerness to push ahead was not what swayed me. It was, instead, my perverse inability to make a decision. In my head at the time, a broken record was playing: I wish I didn’t have to make this decision right now. This is the worst decision in the world.
What happened to me in 2002 on Annapurna gave me much-needed clarity about what had gone on a decade earlier on K2. On May 14 of that year, J.-C. Lafaille and Alberto Iñurrategi completed an exposed and dangerous snow-and-ice traverse under a tower called the Roc Noir, then began climbing the steep face to regain the crest of the east ridge. Coming along a little behind the lead pair, Veikka Gustafsson and I reached the traverse at 7:30 A.M. I started to lead across, but I realized at once that the slope was loaded with snow ready to slide. All it might take to trigger a fatal avalanche was somebody kicking steps in the unstable surface.
J.-C., the most talented climber I had ever paired up with, had led the traverse, but I balked. He kept yelling down to us how dangerous the conditions were—a fact that was already obvious to me. Torn by conflicting impulses, I remembered being in a similar predicament in 1992. This time a voice in my head warned me, Ed, don’t do now what you did on K2. I turned back, and without hesitation Veikka turned back with me. J.-C. and Alberto pushed on to the summit, but they had a true epic getting down. It was only after they had reversed the traverse under the Roc Noir that they, as J.-C. would later write, “once more entered the land of the living.”
That was the only time on my thirty expeditions to 8,000ers that I ever turned back while a partner went on. But I’ve never second-guessed my decision. The sense that I’d made the right choice helped me congratulate