K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [45]
The sixth member of the party, invited from afar, was Captain Norman Streatfeild, a British officer living in India who had already been on numerous hunting, mapping, and climbing trips to the Karakoram. Streatfeild was not the mountaineering equal of the five Americans, but he would prove invaluable in terms of logistics and dealing with native porters.
When I was still a teenager, long before I’d climbed any peaks myself, I’d read Houston and Bates’s classic K2: The Savage Mountain, about the 1953 expedition. I’d loved the book, because it told the story of how adversity transformed a team into an ideal brotherhood; along with Annapurna, K2: The Savage Mountain had a lot to do with turning me into a mountaineer. But it was not until Scott and I started preparing for our own K2 adventure in 1992 that I read the book about the earlier American expedition.
Five Miles High is a collaborative effort: five of its chapters were written by Bates, five by Houston, four by House, three by Burdsall—and none by Petzoldt. It’s a delightful book, the kind of tale that makes you nostalgic for a vanished era of exploration. It also subscribes firmly to the tradition of keeping the expedition’s dirty laundry far from the eyes of the public. There are tongue-in-cheek gibes about certain members’ habits and foibles (for example, about how much Petzoldt liked to eat), but you’d hardly know that a harsh word or dispute occurred within the team. And there is not the slightest hint of the Wiessner-Houston tension that would explode inside the AAC after 1939.
Houston admits in the first chapter that the Duke of the Abruzzi’s dark prediction still hung over the mountain. “So formidable are the few approaches to its summit,” he writes, “that many climbers have felt the ascent to be impossible.” Houston also baldly declares that the 1938 expedition was conceived as a reconnaissance:
Could we determine which route offered most possibility of success, perhaps a later expedition, unhampered by the need of reconnoitering the mountain, might hope to reach the top. Ours then was to be a preliminary attack whose main plan was to find a way for a later party.
But then he coyly closes the chapter:
We were to examine three main ridges, separated by miles of glacier travel, and to decide which of the three would be most likely to furnish a route to the summit. Finally, given time, weather, and the smile of fortune, we were to try to reach that distant point.
All through the winter and spring before the expedition, the climbers ordered gear and tested food supplies. When you read about the provisions those men took to K2 in 1938, you realize they were closer not only in time but in style to the great Arctic and Antarctic expeditions of the turn of the twentieth century than to our present-day mountaineering jaunts. For instance, the ‘38 climbers brought along fifty pounds of pemmican made in Denmark. Almost nobody eats pemmican anymore, but it was the staple of nineteenth-century explorers. Pemmican is a gooey mixture of dried meat, animal fat, sugar, rice, and raisins. It keeps well in the cold, and it’s very high in calories. I have to confess, though, that I’ve never had a single bite of the stuff. We know now that while pemmican may be great in the Arctic or the Antarctic, it’s way too fatty to digest at high altitudes.
The 1938 team tried out dozens of kinds of biscuits and hard bread. They tested them by dropping them out of a second-floor window and by leaving them out in the rain overnight. They finally chose one brand of biscuit because, as Bates wrote, it “tasted good and resisted moisture, yet needed no sledge hammer to break it.” Bates’s team also swore by some of the first dried vegetables and fruits available, all of them produced by what their makers called a “secret process.” The ‘38 team’s cereals included Cream of Wheat and Maltex. Like all expeditions of their time, the team considered