K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [52]
Four days later, the climbers reached base camp. Streatfeild paid off the porters, who were eager to charge back down the glacier as soon as they could, then gave the head man a pouch containing forty-five stones. “Throw away one stone every day,” he said. “When they are all gone, come back to meet us.”
Now the team had six weeks to reconnoiter K2 and, if there was still time, to try to climb it. But the next seventeen days amounted to a prolonged exercise in futility. The climbers’ first views of the Abruzzi Ridge were not encouraging. On a foray up the Godwin Austen Glacier, Bates and Streatfeild had scrutinized the slopes rising above them. They’d reported that the south face proper looked impossible, while the Abruzzi Ridge presented continuously steep ice gullies and rock ribs all the way up to the Shoulder, more than 8,000 feet above the base.
Dividing into subgroups, the team reconnoitered the Savoia Glacier in an effort to reach both Savoia Pass, and thus the beginning of the northwest ridge, and the Godwin Austen Glacier, toward the start of the northeast ridge. On three separate efforts spread across two weeks, various members failed even to get to Savoia Pass, as they were turned back by crevasses and ice cliffs. These were humiliating setbacks—how could a passage that the Courmayeur guides had pioneered twenty-nine years earlier stump some of America’s best mountaineers? The men rationalized that conditions must have changed radically since 1909, but privately they nursed the fear that they weren’t strong enough to meet the challenge.
One reason for the dogged effort to attack the northwest ridge sprang from an observation first made by the Duke of the Abruzzi. From Savoia Pass, he had seen that the rock strata on the northwest ridge inclined upward, promising staircase-like steps. On the southeast spur on the diametrically opposite side of the mountain, the Italians found just the reverse: downward-sloping slabs and ledges that made for treacherous climbing and insecure campsites.
On the Matterhorn in the early 1860s, the great British climber Edward Whymper had made six attempts on the southwest ridge, failing at increasingly higher points. Finally Whymper attacked the steeper northeast ridge, by which he succeeded in making the first ascent, on July 14, 1865. The difference was entirely due to the angle of the rock strata that composed the core of the mountain: upward-tilting on the northeast, downward-sloping on the southwest.
Whymper’s hard-won lesson was famous in mountaineering annals. The Duke of the Abruzzi intended to take the same advantage of the angle of the strata on K2, as did his successors in 1938. But in this case, the mountain fooled everybody. The northwest ridge would not be climbed for another fifty-three years.
During the two weeks of reconnoitering, the weather was consistently stormy. Fortunately, the team had had the foresight to bring willow wands, apparently at Bob Bates’s insistence. On previous expeditions in Canada and Alaska—especially his amazing first ascent of Mount Lucania with Bradford Washburn in 1937 and his traverse of the Saint Elias Range two years earlier—Bates had learned just how vital wands could be. The type the 1938 party used was a three-foot-long wooden dowel, one end of which was painted black to about seven inches from the head. After a retreat in a snowstorm on the Savoia Glacier, Bill House wrote, “We were glad we had brought Bates’s black-painted wood dowels to mark the trail home, for to get lost on that part of the glacier would have meant a night out or worse.”
To add to the woes of these discouraging days, Petzoldt suffered from several recurrences of his fever. Even at base camp, he would shiver for hours, unable to get warm despite wearing all his clothing inside his sleeping bag. The only treatment his baffled teammates could offer was to brew up one hot drink after another and to “take turns rubbing his back.”
As their efforts simply to get to the