K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [46]
When I look over that K2 food list, I’m struck by how bulky and heavy their provisions were. But then I have to remind myself that they were outfitting in an age long before prepackaged dried foods came on the market, or Power Bars or Pop-Tarts, or instant soups, or tubes of high-energy gel. The kinds of lightweight, easy-to-fix meals we relied on in 1992 simply weren’t available in 1938. On the other hand, those guys had luxuries we never dreamed of. In Askole, for example, they hired a hefty porter with a huge, straw-lined wicker basket for a backpack, in which he managed to carry twenty dozen fresh eggs to base camp without breaking them!
There’s the same historical divide when it comes to equipment. Boots, for instance: in 1938, climbers who wanted the best mountaineering footwear available wore relatively thin leather boots, their soles reinforced with hobnails—little metal cleats affixed to the undersurface. The nails gave you better purchase on ice and snow, but they were a real liability on rock slabs, because your feet tended to skitter off their holds. What’s more, at altitude the hobnails conducted cold straight to your feet, contributing directly to the risk of frostbite all early climbers faced in the Himalaya. It would be decades before Vibram rubber soles got invented, not to mention double boots—especially the kind of combination plastic outer shell and foam inner I wore on most of my 8,000-ers. The 1938 team members ordered custom-made boots from England, and they were so finicky that each man chose the precise pattern of hobnails with which his soles would be studded.
Climbing ropes, at that time, were still made out of hemp or manila. Nylon ropes, which are many times stronger and have a stretchiness that absorbs much of the impact of a fall, were still nearly a decade in the future. The ice axes of the day were three to four feet long and had shafts of hickory or ash, with a straight metal pick and an opposing adze for a handle. They looked more like Victorian alpenstocks (glorified walking sticks) than the short, fanged chrome-molybdenum ice tools we used in 1992.
In 1938, the climbers boxed and sealed all their gear and food and sent it ahead by steamer. On April 14, they sailed from New York, bound first for Europe, then for Bombay.
From the start of the trip, there was a cultural gulf between Petzoldt and his teammates. You won’t find the faintest hint of it in Five Miles High, but the oral traditions of mountaineering have preserved anecdotes about it, and glimpses pop up in the latter-day biographies of Petzoldt and Houston.
Petzoldt was too poor to afford the expedition. Instead, Farnie Loomis—a well-to-do Harvard grad and a member of the Nanda Devi expedition who had climbed with Petzoldt in the Tetons and had recommended him to Houston—paid his way. (Petzoldt was, you might say, the first sponsored climber!) In the perverse logic of the day, that tarred the Wyoming cowboy with a certain unworthiness in the eyes of his Ivy League teammates. And Petzoldt’s profession as a guide, just as perversely, could be seen as a detriment on an expedition, not as an asset.
Petzoldt’s first biographer was his wife, Patricia, who thus may not be an impartial witness. But in 1953, in On Top of the World, she wrote,
Later Paul discovered that there had been some doubts expressed in the [American Alpine] Club as to whether he would be able to adjust himself socially to the rest of the party. The fact that he was a professional, a guide, had been questioned; and then of course he was a Westerner and, although he was known to have had some education, he had not attended an Ivy League college.
Houston’s biographer Bernadette