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I can completely sympathize with those guys’ predicament. No one was really to blame—the true cause of the potentially fatal accident was the bad placement of Camp III. But given the logistics of the day, that placement was unavoidable. What else could Houston and Petzoldt have done? They weren’t happy with the location of Camp III, but they had to climb. From 500 feet above, you can’t tell where the rocks you knock loose are landing. And on that kind of sketchy terrain, it’s almost impossible to avoid dislodging rocks.

But in Five Miles High, House gives the dispute a happy ending:

While we sat and sulked, seeking the most effective way of voicing our great displeasure, [Houston and Petzoldt] rummaged through the food supplies. A short time later they brought humble offerings of jam, dates, and hot tea hastily conjured out of sun-melted snow. With such companions ill-humor could not last long, and soon we were laughing sheepishly at what we had let ourselves in for.

So the official expedition narrative sticks to its formula of tucking the dirty laundry out of sight. But in her 2007 biography of Houston, Bernadette McDonald published excerpts from Houston’s letters home that, when I first read them, puzzled me. “Petzoldt has turned out to be a gem,” Houston wrote early on in the expedition. The tension between the cowboy and the nabob seemed to have vanished. It was instead Bill House of whom Houston was critical. “He is continually complaining about the lack of food,” Houston wrote around June 27, “and demands much more than we are able to provide. He is a very fine climber, but his choice of routes is poor and he takes far too many chances. In addition, he has frequent depressed spells during which is very bad company.”

These strictures are all the more surprising in view of the fact that House led many of the hardest pitches all the way up the Abruzzi Ridge to just below the Shoulder, including the indisputable crux of that 8,000-foot ascent. As I mentioned earlier, the nearly vertical 80-foot rock fissure at 21,500 feet has been known ever since as House’s Chimney. On July 14, with Bates belaying, House tackled the cliff.

The team had pitched Camp IV only 75 feet below that cliff, but the ice leading up to it was so hard that it took the two men a full hour to chop steps to reach the base of the chimney. Bates set up a belay by draping a loop of rope over a prong of rock, then passing the rope behind the prong. That technique harkened back to Victorian times, but by today’s standards it seems pretty marginal. If House had fallen off the cliff, the hemp rope might well have severed as it came tight on the sharp rock.

House’s lead was a desperate struggle, as it took him two and a half hours to surmount the 80-foot pitch. He managed to drive a good piton near the base of the crack, but 40 feet higher, as he stood on a tiny ledge and tried to place a second piton, “the metal only crumpled up after penetrating a half-inch of rock.” (The soft-iron pitons of the day, the best available, were all too liable to bend into useless spikes under a hammer blow. It would not be until the 1960s that chrome-molybdenum pitons vastly improved on the old hardware.)

To inch his way up the fissure, House got into classic chimney position, feet flat against one wall, back against the other. Abruptly, however, he realized that he had left his crampons in his pack. The metal spikes dug into his back and caught on nubbins of rock. Only by thrashing his way brutally upward could House gain ground. “I felt I was pretty close to my margin of safety,” he later wrote, “but there were no piton cracks and I thought anything would be better than climbing down without some protection from above.”

Out of sight around a corner below, shivering with cold, Bates shouted up to urge that House retreat. “It was a suggestion I certainly would have liked to follow,” House joked in retrospect. Instead, he struggled onward, at last emerging on top of the cliff.

The importance of House’s brilliant lead can hardly be overestimated. In that