K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [60]
In Ringholz’s account, Petzoldt and the other witnesses to the accident fabricated a bogus version of what had happened. Even so, Petzoldt was charged with manslaughter and underwent a three-day trial before he was acquitted. By then, he was flat broke. The American consul took him under his wing and communicated with Charlie Houston, who was back in the United States. Houston shared the news with Bates and House. The four men scrounged up $550, which they wired to Calcutta. The money paid for both Petzoldts’ passage home by steamer.
Yet according to Ringholz, Petzoldt never realized that his teammates had come to his financial rescue. “I never knew that they sent the money there,” he told his biographer. “If they sent money to the consul, I never got it.”
After interviewing those former teammates, Ringholz wrote:
Unfortunately, the $550 has been the source of ill feeling among the members of the K2 expedition for almost sixty years. Houston, House, and Bates claim it was difficult for them to scrape up that amount of money in those days when they were young and not established. They expected, and contend that Petzoldt promised them, that on his return to the States the loan would be repaid.
Houston’s biographer Bernadette McDonald comes to a similar conclusion:
Back in the United States, Charlie received an urgent cable from the Consul General requesting money. Together with his father, he quietly made the necessary arrangements for Petzoldt to return. Charlie never completely forgave Petzoldt for not thanking his family for helping him out in this moment of need. Petzoldt claimed ignorance on the source of the money, but the friendship subsequently withered.
Whether or not this event caused the estrangement between Petzoldt and Houston, there seems to have been another source of lasting rancor between the men. Houston always felt that his team had done the very best it could on K2. To have reached 26,000 feet on the first real attempt on the great mountain was more than anyone could have hoped for. But Petzoldt evidently thought the team could have done better.
A little-known fact about the 1938 expedition is that the members took along a movie camera, with which they shot footage not only on the approach to the Baltoro but all the way up to Camp III on the Abruzzi. In 2004, sixty-six years after the expedition, Houston had the best footage remastered and put on a DVD. A DVD disk was inserted in a plastic sleeve in each copy of McDonald’s Brotherhood of the Rope.
There’s some amazing footage from that expedition. For me, the most moving scene was shot as the climbers packed up their camps in a gathering storm to head down the mountain. The camera catches a tent flapping wildly in the wind, in front of which Bob Bates is grinning as he sings his head off—perhaps some Alaska sourdough ditty or one of the railroad ballads, such as “The Wreck of the Old 97,” that he had memorized and would sing at the drop of a hat for the rest of his life. There’s no sound track on the film, but in the voice-over that he supplied in 2004, Houston narrates:
We have done what we came to do. We have found a route to the summit cone, and we’re very happy and ready to go Home…. As the storm thickens, it’s clear that we must start for home as soon as the weather clears. In a few days it does clear, and we go on down to base camp, arriving there two days later, very excited, very happy. We have accomplished far more than most people expected we would. We have found a route up the mountain, and we enjoyed every minute of our success.
That formula summarizes Houston’s lasting feelings about the 1938 expedition. But Petzoldt’s lasting feelings were different—and less happy.
A friend of mine met Petzoldt in 1963, when he took a job as an assistant instructor