K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [51]
So the rest of the party pushed ahead. For the first time, they marched beneath the savage pyramids of K2’s outliers, peaks that somehow seemed familiar, since they had seen them in Vittorio Sella’s magnificent photographs. At Paiju, “the last little island of vegetation,” as Bates put it, they turned a corner and saw ahead of them “the gray back of the Baltoro Glacier, looking like a huge reptile.” In 1992, we found Paiju a bit squalid, since so many other expeditions had camped and left their trash there over the years. When I passed through again in 2003, on the way to Broad Peak, I saw that some Pakistani environmental agency had built outhouses and concrete washbasins in an effort to clean the place up. Still, Paiju will always be a memorable camp for me, because it was here on our 1992 approach that Scott and I took a full rest day, during which we hiked up a wooded hill to a rocky ridge and got that stunning first view of K2.
The 1938 team clambered onto the snout of the Baltoro. The mood of Bates’s writing at this point is uncharacteristically gloomy. He describes “the dismal, boulder-strewn surface” of the permanent ice and remarks, “An air of death and decay hung over this part of the glacier.” No doubt the men’s spirits were dampened by the absence of Houston and Petzoldt, but even today, the lower stretches of the Baltoro make for tedious hiking. You have to wind in and out and up and down through what Bates called “mounds and ridges of loose debris.” Oddly enough, although you’re on a glacier, the daytime heat is blistering, and the ground is dry and dusty. In ‘92, we hiked here in shorts, shading ourselves with umbrellas but sweating like dogs the whole way.
Of their first couple of days on the Baltoro Glacier, Bates writes, “For us the uncertain footing was little more than irritating, but for our coolies, with straw or goat-skin moccasins, the passage was severe.” Instead of ice axes, each porter wielded a “coolie crutch,” a wooden device stout enough to cut steps in the ice which also served as a tripod on which to rest one’s load.
On June 8, the team camped at Urdukas, a beautiful grassy oasis just off the glacier on the southern side. For centuries, Balti herdsmen have driven their flocks to Urdukas to graze, but that’s as close as most of them ever got to K2, and since you can’t see the mountain from that patch of greenery, that may explain why K2 scarcely has a native name. In 1992, it was still a lovely place; you could lounge in the grass and get out of the sun in the shade of large boulders that have come to rest there.
The whole hike in to K2 is utterly different from the approaches to 8,000ers in Nepal. If you’re hiking in to Everest on the south side, you pass through villages with tea shops and even restaurants. Your Sherpa take off each night to go visit their cousins, then show up in the morning. The whole thing feels very civilized. On the much more difficult approach to K2, there are no villages—or even isolated houses—after Askole. You’re camping out with the porters, most of the time on the glacier. Yet however stark or tedious it may seem at times, that forty-mile approach up the Baltoro is beautiful in its own right.
In 1938, while the men were loafing at Urdukas, Pasang Kikuli suddenly pointed west down the glacier and shouted, “Sahibs, sahibs, look see!” Through binoculars, the two black dots the Sherpa had spotted proved to be Petzoldt and Houston hiking along at a furious pace. “How in the world did he do it?” Burdsall exclaimed.
“Charlie fixed me