K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [39]
Instead, I sat there in silence for long minutes. I looked at his surroundings, then back at the body of my friend. “Hey, Scott,” I said, “how you doing?” The only answer was the droning of the wind.
“What happened, man?”
In 2003, I climbed Broad Peak with J.-C. Lafaille. As we sat basking on top, we stared at the beautiful pyramid of K2, six miles to the northwest. Just two years earlier, J.-C. had had his own epic on K2. His intention was to make a rapid solo ascent of the Cesen route, the western variant of the Abruzzi Ridge. But the conditions were hideous. As J.-C. later explained, “The snow had a bizarre, almost dusty consistency. Above 22,000 feet, you had the feeling of swimming in polystyrene, or in polenta.”
Instead of soloing the route, J.-C. teamed up with the great Tyrolean climber Hans Kammerlander, a longtime partner of Reinhold Messner, who had also been eyeing a solo ascent. The two superalpinists left base camp on July 20. Only two days later, at 2:30 in the afternoon, they embraced on the summit. But the descent became a nightmare. Like me in 1992, J.-C. was all but certain that an avalanche would sweep Kammerlander and himself off the mountain. That same day, a Korean climber fell to his death from the Abruzzi Ridge.
Now, on top of Broad Peak, as we stared at K2, I said to J.-C., “Boy, I’m glad I don’t have to climb that again!” A thin-lipped smile seized his face. “Oui,” he answered, “moi aussi.” Then, remembering my ignorance of French, he added, “Yes. Me too, I am very happy not to do it again!”
3
BREAKTHROUGH
People always wonder how K2 got its name. The answer is, in one sense, completely mundane, but in another, it’s an object lesson in just how hard it is to find an appropriate name for a great geographical feature. Rising from the middle of the Karakoram Range, K2 is guarded on all sides by other towering mountains and by major glaciers. It is much harder to see from the lowlands than Mount Everest is.
It was the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, that indefatigable and classically British mapping project, that “discovered” both Everest and K2. The Everest story is fairly well known. In 1849 three surveyors trained a theodolite on a far distant summit peeking over ridgelines in front of it. They jotted down their data, then soullessly named the summit Peak XV. It was not until three years later that a Bengali “computer”—a clerk whose job it was to work out calculations—came rushing into the office of India’s surveyor general to announce that he had “discovered the highest mountain in the world.”
Carrying the survey through hundreds of stations all the way from the seacoast, the computer, Radhanath Sikdar, had deduced an altitude of 29,002 feet. This was an amazingly accurate measurement: today, the mountain’s official altitude is 29,035 feet above sea level. It took another thirteen years, however, for the surveyor general to discard the name Peak XV and replace it with Mount Everest, commemorating his predecessor, Sir George Everest.
In 1856, another plucky field-worker for the Great Trigonometrical Survey, Lieutenant T. G. Montgomerie, dragged his heavy theodolite to an altitude of 16,000 feet on a mountain overlooking Srinagar, in Kashmir. From that lofty vantage point, Montgomerie gazed at the Karakoram, 130 miles to the north. Taking fixes on the two most prominent summits, he labeled them K1 and K2 (K was short for Karakoram). K1 is known today as Masherbrum, a handsome 25,660-foot mountain first climbed by Americans in 1960. Two years after Montgomerie took his readings, the altitude of K2 was calculated to be 28,287 feet—also an astoundingly accurate measurement, only 36 feet in excess of its official altitude today. Several other peaks labeled in the K series still retain their original names, including the beautiful