K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [53]
Partway up this [summit] cone is a great hanging glacier which sweeps the upper part of the northeast ridge as well as one corner of the Abruzzi ridge. Care would be needed in crossing the plateau from this last ridge, but it looked as though it could be done safely.
On June 28, the team gathered at base camp for what expeditioneers like to call a “council of war.” Only two members—Petzoldt and House—favored an attack on the Abruzzi Ridge. Houston and Burdsall argued for yet another attempt to reach the northeast ridge. Bates and Streatfeild were neutral.
During the next several days, the climbers made a couple of very tentative thrusts up the lower slopes of the Abruzzi. On one of them, Houston and House discovered a few wooden sticks, which they realized had to be debris from the Duke of the Abruzzi’s boxes. They had reached the highest point to which the Italians had managed to haul supplies, and were now only 500 feet below the cliff where the Courmayeur guides had turned back in 1909. Like the Italians, the Americans recognized immediately that the biggest problem with the Abruzzi was the lack of suitable campsites. As House put it,
To have found such a long stretch on the ridge devoid of any places where tent platforms could be built and reached by loaded men was serious. It seemed to close up the last avenue of hope we had had for finding a route on K2. On top of this setback, one of our strongest climbers was ill.
One of the things that I most respect about the 1938 team is that after all their setbacks, they didn’t simply pack up and go home. By July 2, when House and Petzoldt made the first real stab at the Abruzzi, the party had been in the field for fifty-two days since they had started hiking from Srinagar. They had worn themselves out reconnoitering K2, without as yet deciding which route might go. It would have been tempting to throw in the towel and leave the solution to a 1939 expedition.
There’s a memorable passage in one of House’s chapters revealing just how far morale had plunged, and how thoughts of home were tugging at each of the climbers:
The expedition spirits were now at very low ebb. From one side of the mountain to the other we had been unable to find a route. Two weeks had been spent apparently to no other purpose than to convince us that no way we had seen was possible…. Every one of us would have liked to be clear of the whole business right then.
Had we been able to spend an afternoon relaxing at the seashore or getting very drunk, we might have realized that two weeks of reconnaissance on a mountain as big as K2 could not possibly be conclusive…. At that time, however, it seemed as though each succeeding judgment had been upheld by later checking and that there was no hope at all. Unfortunately the seashore was a thousand miles away and our supply of rum far too slender to indulge in as an escape.
In a letter home written about this time, Houston gave voice to his deep pessimism. “This is a bigger, harder mountain than any of us realized before,” he wrote, “and it will take a better party than ours a much longer time than we have left, in order to get anywhere at all.”
On July 2, Petzoldt (whose feverish fits alternated with startling recoveries) and House started up the Abruzzi, determined to find a campsite. They had almost given up hope when Petzoldt crawled around a corner and found a tiny but perfect saddle in the ridge, protected from the wind and falling rocks and just big enough for several tents. The next day, the whole team, including the Sherpa, packed loads up to that saddle and established