K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [41]
The team was rounded out with a twenty-two-year-old Englishman, a former Swiss ex-army doctor, and two Austrians. In his Confessions, Crowley is downright withering about these four companions. The Englishman “knew practically nothing of mountains, but he had common sense enough to do what Eckenstein told him;” the Swiss “knew as little of mountains as he did of medicine.” But Crowley’s contempt rises to a fever pitch when he writes about the Austrians, Pfannl and Wessely. Pfannl was “reputed the best rock climber in Austria,” but during the expedition, he “went actually mad,” while Wessely “brooded on food to the point of stealing it.” In retrospect, Crowley decided, “we should have done better to take none of the foreigners.” (Needless to say, Crowley’s memoir is a startling exception to the traditional narrative convention of keeping all the expedition’s dirty laundry out of sight.)
With the team only in Askole, the last village before the Baltoro Glacier, Pfannl and Wessely (if Crowley can be believed) asked their leaders if they could put three days’ provisions in their rucksacks and go off and climb K2! Even today, Askole is a good six-or seven-day march away from base camp. In Confessions, Crowley ridicules the näiveté of the Austrians: “It is really astonishing that so many days of travel had taught them nothing about the scale of the mountains.”
Yet the Austrians’ mistake was one commonly made by Europeans during the early attempts on the great peaks of the Himalaya and the Karakoram. In 1895, A. F. Mummery, the finest British climber of his generation, organized the first expedition to Nanga Parbat. Mummery had put up many bold routes in the Alps and Caucasus, but he didn’t seem to recognize that Nanga Parbat was of a different order of magnitude from, say, the Matterhorn. He set off to reconnoiter the lower slopes of the mountain so casually that he took with him only two porters, rather than any British teammates. None of the three men was ever seen again.
The Europeans dimly recognized that the sheer altitude of the world’s highest peaks would present problems unknown in the Alps. But they developed some pretty wacky theories about how to deal with thin air. Norman Collie, Mummery’s teammate on Nanga Parbat and a mentor to Crowley, was convinced that “the only chance of getting up a big mountain was to rush it.” On the K2 expedition, Crowley wholeheartedly endorsed this absurd formula. “The only thing to do,” he wrote, “is to lay in a stock of energy, get rid of all your fat at the exact moment when you have a chance to climb a mountain, and jump back out of its reach, so to speak, before it can take its revenge.”
On the Baltoro, after many days, the expedition established a camp right at the base of what would come to be called the Abruzzi Ridge. Crowley recognized that spur as a plausible route, but now it was his turn radically to underestimate the scale and difficulty of K2. After studying the slopes above him for a full day, he concluded, as he later wrote, “that while the south face, perhaps possible theoretically, meant a complicated climb with no half-way house, there should be no difficulty in walking up the snow slopes on the east-south-east to the snowy shoulder below the final rock pyramid.”
Whew! The south face, on which Reinhold Messner would later identify the fiendish but beautiful route he called the “Magic Line,” would not be climbed until 1986. And it would be another thirty-six years after Crowley camped at the base of his “east-south-east” route that the first climbers pushed the Abruzzi Ridge as far as the Shoulder, at 26,000 feet. When they did so, it was not by “walking,” but only by virtue of some of the hardest climbing yet performed at such an altitude anywhere in the world. (Crowley’s very vocabulary betrays his dependency on the Alps as reference point: “no half-way