K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [36]
On August 16, 1992, Scott, Charley, and I broke free of the clouds just short of the summit. We saw it shining in the sun ahead of us. At noon, we stood on top, hugging each other and gasping in the thin air. My elation was genuine, but it was tempered by a mounting anxiety as I stared at the boiling black clouds below us. After only thirty minutes on top, we headed down.
Almost immediately we plunged back into that sea of clouds, which was now darker and more ominous than ever. Soon we were stumbling downward in a thick whiteout. It was then that Scott, in the lead, started to head off in the wrong direction, toward the top of the unknown east face. On the way up, I’d memorized even the subtlest landmarks, and now I was able to shout, “No, no, no! Wrong way, Scott! Farther to the right!”
By the time we got to the ramp that led down to the Bottleneck, the snow conditions were appalling. Most of the drifts were thigh-deep, and as I broke trail, I kept knocking loose huge slabs that thundered out of sight into the void below. By now, I was convinced that we were going to die. I kept telling myself that I’d probably just made the last and most stupid mistake of my life. That realization brought with it a weird sense of calm: Well, you might as well give it your best effort. You’ve got nothing to lose now.
At last we reached the near end of the crux traverse. There was no hope of reversing the pitch in the footsteps we had kicked on the way up—they were lost under layers of deep new snow. Instead, one by one we rappelled the fixed rope until we reached its sagging midpoint, then jumared back up to the farther anchor. From there, at the top of the Bottleneck, we faced in and started to kick steps downward. We were un-roped, since we knew that if one guy fell here, the rope would also pull the other two off.
Miraculously, none of the snow slabs broke loose beneath our feet. We downclimbed slowly, until at last the angle gentled out where the summit pyramid meets the Shoulder. By now, the whiteout was so thick, we couldn’t see Camp IV. So we spread out, three abreast, and clomped on down, like searchers looking for clues in a crime scene in the forest. When we got to the top of the Shoulder, we started calling out, hoping Rob and Gary could guide us into camp. At last they heard us and shouted back.
We reached the tents at 5:00 P.M. We’d been climbing for almost sixteen hours.
I sat down in the snow outside our bivy tent. At that moment, I felt no happiness whatsoever at having climbed K2. Instead, I felt only anger at myself. That very evening, I wrote in my diary, “We’d pushed our luck beyond the max. I hope I never do that again! No summit is worth dying for. You can always come back.”
K2 was not done messing with us. As we’d reached Camp IV, I’d asked Rob, “What happened to you guys?”
A stricken look had crossed his face. “Gary’s pretty sick,” he’d said softly.
That morning, Rob and Gary had barely gotten started when Gary collapsed with severe breathing problems. It was all Rob could do to get his partner back to camp. Throughout the day, as he lay in the tent, Gary’s condition steadily worsened. Eventually we would conclude that he had a bad case of pulmonary edema.
Exhausted though we were, Scott, Charley, and I would now have to get a nearly helpless climber down the mountain. It would have been tempting to take a rest day on August 17, but I knew better. I wrote in my diary, “We gotta get outta here. Don’t want to get trapped here & die like all those people in ’86…. This mountain is gonna kick our ass all the way down.”
In terms of avalanche danger, the conditions were still terrible. Knowing there might not be any tents still standing at the camps below, I packed our bivy tent, and we carried our sleeping bags with