K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [43]
In 1909, the duke’s party turned north at the glacier junction called Concordia. On May 27—much earlier than most later parties would attack the mountain—they pitched a base camp at the foot of the mountain’s southeast spur. To the duke, unlike Aleister Crowley, that steep and complicated arête rising almost 9,000 feet to the Shoulder looked like anything but a walk-up. So Abruzzi postponed his attempt, while the team made a quick foray toward the northeast ridge, the route attempted by the Eckenstein-Crowley party in 1902. The guides, however, knew a hopeless route when they saw one, and quickly turned back.
On May 29, the duke, five of the Courmayeur men, and a number of Balti porters started up the southeast spur. By June 1, they had managed to establish a camp at 18,250 feet, only some 800 feet above the base of the ridge. There, however, the Balti porters saw falling rocks careening down from above and refused to carry any farther. (I can sympathize with those poor guys. They’d never been on terrain like this before in their lives. And the lower slopes on the Abruzzi Ridge feel constantly threatened by falling debris. Even on easy ground, you’re always looking up to see if anything is coming your way.)
During the next two days, some of the Courmayeur men, led by the father-and-son guides Joseph and Laurent Petigax, pushed higher. On the harder passages, they left heavy hemp ropes in place—the first fixed ropes ever strung on K2. But it became obvious to the Petigaxes that some of the pitches would be too hard for the Balti porters, even if they could be talked into giving it a go. Without porters, there was no hope of mounting a logistical pyramid toward the summit.
Discouraged, the guides turned back. At the lower camp, the duke accepted their judgment and called off the attempt. The highest point reached by the Petigaxes is uncertain, but it was probably around 21,000 feet. (Incidentally, the Italians retrieved their fixed ropes as they descended—something virtually no subsequent expeditions would ever do.)
Still, the Duke of the Abruzzi was not ready to give up on K2. Now he turned his team toward a reconnaissance of the unexplored western reaches of the mountain. Ascending the Savoia Glacier (which he named after his home stomping grounds in Italy), he tried to gain the high col from which the northwest ridge rises. After a monumental twelve-hour push of step cutting in hard ice and snow, the team reached the col, which they named Savoia Pass, at an altitude they measured at 21,870 feet. But there they found themselves cut off from the northwest ridge by a dangerously corniced crest. Once more, K2 turned the duke back. The mountain would not be climbed from this side until 1991.
The team still had several weeks’ worth of supplies stockpiled on the Baltoro. So the duke turned his attention to several lesser peaks. On Chogolisa, he and three of the Courmayeur guides reached an altitude that they measured at 24,275 feet. Faced with dangerous cornices and crevasses, they retreated only 850 feet short of the summit. Still, they had achieved a new record: nobody in the world had ever climbed so high. The record would stand for thirteen years, until the second British expedition to Everest bettered it in 1922.
The duke had perhaps been spoiled by his blithe successes on Saint Elias and the Ruwenzori. It came as a rude rebuff to him to be turned back on K2 nearly 6,400 feet below the summit. And so, once back in Italy, one of the strongest mountaineers in the world declared that he believed K2 would never be climbed.
That malediction took its toll. K2 would not be attempted again for twenty-nine years. In the meantime, seven expeditions did battle with Mount Everest, and six different men turned back (or, in Mallory and Irvine’s case, disappeared) above 28,000 feet, within a tantalizing thousand feet of the summit.
By 1938 on K2, no one had succeeded