K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [44]
Beginning in the mid-1930s, the American Alpine Club (AAC) repeatedly petitioned the government of Kashmir for a permit for a K2 expedition. In those days, climbing in America lagged far behind the standards set by British, French, German, Italian, Swiss, and Austrian climbers. But in 1936, four young American climbers, all of them graduates of Harvard, joined up with four more senior (and more famous) Brits to make the first ascent of Nanda Devi, a beautiful and difficult 25,643-foot mountain in northern India. At the time, it was the highest summit reached anywhere in the world—a record that would stand for another fourteen years, until the French climbed Annapurna in 1950.
Out of the party of eight, only two—the Englishmen H. W. Tilman and Noel Odell—reached the summit. The strongest American was Charlie Houston, a twenty-two-year-old graduate student at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Despite his youth, Houston had climbed in the Alps as a teenager and was already the veteran of two major Alaskan expeditions, including the first ascent of Mount Foraker, the second-highest peak in the Alaska Range. Houston was chosen for the summit party on Nanda Devi, but the night before the assault he came down with a terrible case of food poisoning, and Tilman took his place.
When permission for K2 finally came through, in 1937, the AAC offered the leadership of the expedition to Fritz Wiessner, a German-American from Dresden who had immigrated to the States in 1929 and gained citizenship in 1935. Wiessner was without a doubt the finest American climber of his day. After putting up new routes on several of the hardest faces in the Alps, he had bagged some of the great prizes in North America, including the first ascent of Mount Waddington, the rugged and intricate peak that is the highest summit in the stormy Coast Range of British Columbia, which had defeated sixteen previous attempts. Wiessner was also the only American with experience on an 8,000-meter peak, as he had served on the 1932 German expedition to Nanga Parbat, where he was one of three climbers to reach a high point of 23,000 feet.
Wiessner ran his own successful chemistry business in Vermont, specializing in the manufacture of ski wax. By the time the AAC got permission for K2, he was too bogged down in business obligations to go to the Karakoram the next summer, so he recommended that the expedition be turned over to Charlie Houston. Oddly enough, that magnanimous referral would be the spark for a lifelong, often bitter antipathy between Houston and Wiessner.
Houston leapt at the chance to lead the expedition. But from the start, he harbored the suspicion that Wiessner had a hidden agenda. The permit the AAC had obtained was good for two years; if the 1938 expedition failed to get up K2, Americans could organize another crack at the mountain for 1939.
Houston’s first choice for the team was Bob Bates, a good friend of his from Harvard, himself a veteran of two Alaskan expeditions. In February 1938, Bates wrote a letter to another Harvard crony in which he voiced the fears he and Houston already entertained: “Weissner’s [sic] idea, I suppose, is to have us do the reconnaissance + possibly the dirty work + then go in next year and profit by our mistakes. This is pretty surely it, but keep it to yourself.”
Houston put together a strong team. Besides Bates, the climbers included Bill House, Wiessner’s partner on the Waddington first ascent; Richard Burdsall, who had reached the summit of the remote and lofty Minya Konka in western China in 1932; and Paul Petzoldt. Houston, Bates, Burdsall, and House were all easterners and Ivy League graduates—the first three had gone to Harvard, House to Yale. Petzoldt not only hadn’t gone to college, he was a cowboy from Wyoming. But he was also one of the strongest climbers in the country, having pioneered some of the