K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [61]
Asked the same question by Raye Ringholz for her 1997 biography, Petzoldt responded more vehemently. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “We weren’t turned back by bad weather. We made up our mind not to climb the mountain. If we’d have brought up a little bit more food and planned to get to the summit, we could have gone back as conquerors of K2!”
Well, that’s how memory works. In hindsight, it’s pretty hard to congratulate yourself for making the right decision and turning back. I know that’s been a key to my own success on the 8,000ers—turning around and coming back to fight another day, even when it means giving up the glory. There’s no doubt in my mind that in 1938, Houston and Petzoldt made the right decision. They reached the highest point they could, while still allowing the whole team to get safely down.
But the anguish of that “what might have been” seems to have gnawed away at Petzoldt for the rest of his life. For whatever reasons, he never went back to the Himalaya or the Karakoram. The final word—and the saddest—on the gulf between Petzoldt and Houston came at the Telluride mountain film festival in the late 1990s. Both men were on a panel celebrating K2. The chairperson was Rick Ridgeway, who in 1978 had been one of the first four Americans to climb K2. In Brotherhood of the Rope, Bernadette McDonald replayed the scene:
[Petzoldt] said that he had been opposed to the decision to go down, and that the decision had been taken because Charlie wasn’t feeling well. Ridgeway looked over at Charlie and raised his eyebrows. Charlie said nothing. He was hurt and angry, but he didn’t respond.
As far as I know, Petzoldt never claimed that if Houston hadn’t decided to turn around, the two of them (or Petzoldt solo) could have reached the summit on July 21. Petzoldt’s declaration at the Telluride festival implies that he felt the team hadn’t built up enough supplies or pushed their deadlines hard enough to make a legitimate try for the summit. It’s just possible that he harbored a private fantasy that he could have gone for the top alone on July 21, as Hermann Buhl would do on Nanga Parbat in 1953. But it wouldn’t have been realistic.
Look at our own 1992 expedition. Vlad, who was a really strong climber, and who had the advantage of more than half a century of improvement in gear and knowledge of the mountain, left his camp on the Shoulder at 3:00 A.M. with a strong partner. He didn’t reach the summit until 9:00 P.M., after eighteen straight hours of climbing. Then he had to bivouac on the way down.
Houston and Petzoldt didn’t reach the upper end of the Shoulder until 1:00 P.M. on July 21. By that point they were already worn out from the climb from Camp VII. Even if Petzoldt had been strong enough to go all the way to the top, there’s no way he could have gotten there before nightfall. My God, in 1938 they didn’t even have headlamps—just flashlights they’d hold in one hand! And with the clothing they wore, I doubt that either Petzoldt or Houston could have survived a bivouac above 26,000 feet. And even if they had survived, they might have suffered debilitating frostbite.
In no sense should the 1938 expedition ever be regarded as a failure. It was, instead, a true breakthrough. When the summits of the fourteen 8,000ers were finally reached for the first time, between 1950 and 1964, only a single one—Annapurna—was climbed on the first attempt (and that at the cost of Herzog’s fingers and toes and Lachenal’s toes). K2 would finally be climbed only on the fourth attempt (or the sixth, if you count the 1902 and 1909 expeditions).
One of the things I admire about the 1938 expedition is that all the serious climbing was carried out by a team of only four,