K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [49]
In all honesty, I can’t say that I wish we had had to hike 360 miles to get to K2. But in rereading Bates’s chapters, I realize that we moderns have lost some of the richness of the full expedition experience. Today it seems that we want to race to base camp just to start our climbs, and we forget to savor the approach journey, with its valuable transition from modern society into mountain wilderness.
Just reading Bates’s evocations of the landscape makes me envious:
The rest of the march to Kharal lay along rocky hillsides marked infrequently across the river with terraced villages shaded by cool groves of apricot and mulberry trees. Brilliant green fields of barley soothed our eyes, even as in our imagination the shade of the trees cooled our bodies.
A standard snafu on classic expeditions is the porter strike. Without warning, in the most inconvenient spot possible, the “coolies” will throw down their packs and refuse to go a step farther, unless their wages are doubled or tripled. At this point, in the Western author’s eyes, the cheerful natives become “rogues” or “rascals.” Rare is the climber who recognizes that the porter strike is just another form of bargaining, an integral part of native culture.
Still, a porter strike can cripple an expedition. I’ve been pretty lucky, in that among all thirty of my expeditions, the worst porter strike I had to face was hiking in to Broad Peak in 1997. Several days up the Baltoro, the porters stopped and demanded higher wages. We had agreed on set wages at the start on the trip, but after a few days that didn’t seem to matter. Our only option was to call their bluff. We told the porters we would send them back unpaid, while a couple of us would return to Askole and hire new porters. Somehow that convinced them to keep going.
The 1938 team was lucky, too, in that the only porter strike they had to deal with came quite late on the trek, midway between Skardu and Askole. On May 27, 279 miles out from Srinagar, at the tiny hill village of Yuno, the team paid off their pony men and tried to hire local “coolies.” But two “trouble makers” (Bates’s phrase) held out for a wage of four and a half rupees per man for the 44-mile carry to Askole, rather than the two rupees and eight annas (about 95 cents) the climbers were willing to pay. The disagreement almost turned into a brawl, as sixty Yuno men “yelled and surged forward.” The Sherpa seized their ice axes and brandished them as weapons, pleading, “Let us at them, sahibs. We do not like these men.”
Rather than give in to the natives’ demand, the team concocted a solution that, I think it’s safe to say, no other expedition to the Karakoram has ever resorted to. Bob Bates and Norman Streatfeild decided to raft back to Skardu to hire better porters than the Yuno “scoundrels.”
To get from Yuno to Skardu, the men would have to navigate twenty-eight miles of river, first through the raging rapids of the Shigar, then along the powerful current of the Indus. The craft of choice was a zok. It consisted of twenty-eight inflated goatskin bladders covered with a framework of slender poplar poles. The whole thing weighed only a hundred pounds. In a photograph reproduced in Five Miles High, the zok looks incredibly flimsy.
All the work was done by local boatmen, as Bates and Streatfeild sat in the middle and hung on. Bates recounts this watery adventure almost as a lark. The boatmen, he says,
spent the time alternately grounding us on sandbars, spinning us round and round in the swift water, and examining our shoes. When we approached rapids in the river they put down their poles and prayed loudly, while we spun and tossed and held on grimly; but the raft seemed unsinkable