K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [38]
During those reflective moments at base camp, I made a solemn vow to myself—one that, I’m happy to say, I stuck to throughout the following thirteen years of going after 8,000ers. The vow: Your instincts are telling you something. Trust them and listen to them.
Before K2, although we had never climbed together, Scott and I thought we might have found the perfect partnership. We were already planning an expedition for the summer of 1993 that might have been even more ambitious than K2: a two-man, alpine-style assault on the huge Diamir Face of Nanga Parbat.
Despite all the setbacks and animosities, Scott and I got along great on K2. In all the pages of my diary, though I tended to let fly at other climbers on the mountain who weren’t doing their jobs, there’s scarcely a harsh word about Scott.
Yet Scott and I never climbed together again. And that was my decision. We simply had different styles. Scott was a freewheeling, let-it-happen kind of guy. I was more calculating. Ours, I realized, was not an equal partnership in terms of planning, decision making, and bearing the burden of stress. And although we had gotten along well, I could see that Scott and I had different levels of risk we were willing to take.
So when Nanga Parbat came up again, I made some kind of excuse. And I politely declined other invitations from Scott in the following years. We stayed great friends, but we never again shared a rope.
I don’t really regret that choice. But it makes what happened in 1996 all the more poignant. That spring, Scott and I were on the south side of Everest, on different teams: I was part of David Breashears’s IMAX project, while Scott was leading his Mountain Madness clients up the standard route on the world’s highest mountain.
It was great to see my old buddy again. At base camp, we spent some happy hours just shooting the breeze and reliving K2. Some evenings he would wander over to my tent with a couple of bottles of beer, and we would sit outside chatting. Scott seemed to need someone who wasn’t on his team to talk to about their interpersonal dynamics. This was the first time he was guiding a group of clients on Everest. For the future of his Mountain Madness business, it was a huge event. A successful climb in 1996 would boost sign-ups for the following years.
By early May, Scott had decided to join forces with Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants team for their summit attempt. This would mean a relatively large group working its way along the serpentine southeast ridge toward the summit. Scott and Rob announced May 10 as their summit day. Not wanting to be part of this large assault team, our IMAX crew chose to bide our time: we wanted the mountain to ourselves when we tried to shoot our big-screen movie. Scott and I crossed paths on the Lhotse Face as he headed up to the South Col. I gave him a big hug and said, “Have a great trip. Be safe.”
That whole spring, something wasn’t right with Scott. He was sick much of the time, and uncharacteristically weak. He probably should have let his other guides take the clients to the top, but Scott was so used to being big and strong that it never occurred to him not to summit himself. And he had famously nicknamed the South Col route the “Yellow Brick Road,” since he thought he had its ascent down pat.
On May 10, Scott was dragging when he got to the summit, the last member of his team to top out. On the descent, he collapsed at 27,300 feet. We think now that he was probably suffering from cerebral edema. Despite the strenuous efforts of others to save him, Scott died there, curled up on his icy ledge.
Twelve days later, when our IMAX team went to the summit, I knew that I would have to pass Scott’s body above the South Col. And I knew that it would be an emotionally wrenching task. So I saved my last “visit” for the way down.
In midafternoon, I sat down next to Scott’s body. His upper