K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [47]
In his turn, Petzoldt referred to Bates and Houston, behind their backs, as “two Eastern nabobs.” According to McDonald, Petzoldt thought that, far from being sneered at as a professional guide, he ought to be paid an extra salary for bringing his expertise to his “amateur” teammates.
Just as serious was the gulf between Petzoldt and the easterners about the kinds of climbing hardware necessary to attempt K2. Houston and Bates had a British disdain for “ironmongery”—the pitons, carabiners, and direct-aid ladders with which European climbers had recently transformed alpinism. Among the expedition supplies, they had included at most ten pitons. Petzoldt, on the other hand, wholeheartedly embraced the new technical gear, without which he could not have forged his Teton routes. On shipboard, a heated argument broke out over this question, but Petzoldt was outnumbered.
Scandalized by his teammates’ backward attitude, however, Petzoldt sneaked off during a stop in Paris on the way to India and used his last dollars to buy fifty pitons at the shop of the great French climber Pierre Allain. (Allain, incidentally, had been a member of the French expedition to Gasherbrum I just two years earlier.) Petzoldt then smuggled the hardware into the boxes of expedition gear. On K2, of course, the pitons proved invaluable.
By May 9, the team had reached Rawalpindi. In 1992, to get from there to K2, Scott and the trekkers on his permit took a one-hour flight to Skardu. That’s the normal procedure, but the flight was overbooked, and I couldn’t afford it anyway, so I ended up scrounging rides in two antiquated vehicles—a journey that I later called “the 26-hour ride from hell.” On the first bus, a pregnant Pakistani woman vomited out the window at regular intervals. I barely kept from tossing my own cookies. By the time I got to Skardu, I was covered with soot, dirt, and sweat.
After a few days, we bummed a ride on a jeep to cover the last eighty miles to Askole. It was only in Askole that we would actually start hiking, so it seemed that the expedition really began there. The overland journey from Skardu amounted to little more than an ordeal by bouncing truck, shared by a tightly packed band of sweaty fellow passengers. We glimpsed some amazing scenery along the way, but most of the time we were too busy hanging on or too exhausted to care.
In 1938, there was no road from Rawalpindi to Skardu, and there certainly wasn’t an airplane flight. Instead, Houston’s team drove to Srinagar, then hiked all the way not only to Skardu but to Askole, crossing high foothills by the legendary trade route over the Zoji La. The Duke of the Abruzzi had made the same journey in 1909, as had Crowley and Eckenstein in 1902. The total distance from Srinagar to Askole is 320 miles, and from there to base camp is another 40. So in 1938, the climbers had to trek some 360 miles just to get to K2. It took them a month to the day.
This, I’ve always thought, is perhaps the way our modern-day expeditions differ most profoundly from the classic voyages of the first half of the twentieth century. For many climbers today, the hike in is essentially a hassle, a necessary evil in the process of coming to grips with an 8,000er. On the other hand, I like approach marches. Even though the ones we perform today are far shorter than the marathon overland journeys of the 1920s and ‘30s, those hikes give me a chance to acclimate to the wilderness and to take in the local culture. The trek to K2 from Askole—only one-sixth as long as the approach the 1938 expedition made—is wild, harsh, and dusty. There are no other villages after Askole, but the landscape is starkly beautiful.
My most memorable trek in to an 8,000er was the approach to Manaslu in 1999. My only companions were Veikka Gustafsson, our cooksirdar, and a handful of porters. There were no teahouses or hotels,