K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [54]
Studying the two photos of Camp II published in Five Miles High, I can see why this site looked like a godsend—an oasis of safety in the middle of a vast and dangerous slope. But I don’t even remember passing that little saddle on the spur. We didn’t pitch our first camp on the ridge until we’d reached 20,000 feet. Starting in the 1980s, climbers realized that the best way to deal with the scarcity of tent sites on the Abruzzi was to pitch camps as far apart as possible. There are all kinds of reasons, some of them psychological, why this wasn’t feasible for the 1938 team.
Even before they had really gotten launched on the Abruzzi, the team suffered an absurd but monumental misfortune. At Camp I, they had cached a four-gallon gas can, containing a substantial portion of the team’s entire supply of stove fuel. To keep it out of the sun, the men had tucked the can underneath an overhanging rock embedded in the glacial ice. During the next day, the ice melted, causing the rock to topple on top of the can and smash it, spilling the entire contents.
This disaster meant that throughout the rest of the expedition, the climbers would have to be extremely frugal in rationing their fuel. The situation was so dire that Streatfeild, two Sherpa, and the expedition cook decided at once to hike to the base of Gasherbrum I. Streatfield had been with the French team that had attempted that mountain in 1936, and he remembered that the climbers had left unused gas cached there upon their departure. But he also remembered that after the French had gone home, the “coolies” had returned to scavenge what they could.
If he could find no gas beneath Gasherbrum I, Streatfeild planned to resort to a truly desperate expedient. He would send one Sherpa and the cook all the way down to Askole, a seven-day march, to recruit porters to pack huge loads of firewood all the way back up the Baltoro! “This could be used at our Base Camp and possibly higher,” House wrote, “instead of the now precious liquid fuel.”
In the end, Streatfeild’s splinter group hiked more than twenty miles to the French base camp—down the Godwin Austen Glacier to Concordia, then up the Upper Baltoro and the South Gasherbrum glaciers. At the French camp, which had indeed been looted by the porters, they found not a single ounce of stove fuel. They did scavenge some canned meat and vegetables, which ultimately gave the team’s cuisine welcome variety. And, true to his promise, Streatfeild sent one Sherpa, Pemba Kitar, and the cook, Ahdoo, off to Askole to gather firewood. Amazingly, those two returned only eight days later from a trek that normally took fourteen days, accompanied by ten porters carrying massive loads of “fine cedar.” Though it was never used above base camp, the firewood solved the expedition’s fuel problem.
Meanwhile, throughout the first ten days of July, the climbers pushed the route and carried loads up the Abruzzi. To safeguard the harder passages, the men fixed ropes—lines made of three-eighths-inch-diameter hemp, 1,700 feet of which the team had purchased in Bombay. Here the pitons Petzoldt had smuggled into the expedition gear proved invaluable as anchors for the ropes. Nowadays, on steep terrain, we use jumars, mechanical ascenders with which we attach ourselves to nylon fixed ropes. These metal devices slide easily up the rope, but catch and hold fast under a downward pull. In 1938, ascenders were still a quarter century away from being invented. Instead, the climbers tied knots and overhand loops in their hemp fixed ropes, then simply hauled themselves up with their hands.
Descending the steeper passages today, we clip our harnesses to the fixed rope with a figure-eight device and rappel the line. In 1938, the climbers also rappelled, but they did so with the traditional dulfersitz, a simple and ingenious method of wrapping the rope in an S-bend through the crotch, around one hip, up across the chest, and over the opposite