K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [62]
Their effort was a far cry from the kinds of huge militaristic expeditions countries would launch against the 8,000ers in the 1950s. I suppose that in a sense, Houston and his teammates carried an American banner to K2, but their expedition had nothing to do with nationalism. Ever since I first read Five Miles High, that 1938 team has served as a model for me of what a small group working in harmony can achieve on an 8,000er. By pioneering the route by which K2 would eventually be climbed, and by getting to 26,000 feet, they pulled off a magnificent achievement.
4
THE GREAT MYSTERY
The deepest mystery in K2 history is what happened on the 1939 expedition. All the other major campaigns on the mountain produced not only “official” books but articles and chapters in memoirs by the principal climbers. From the 1939 expedition, the only English-language publications to see the light of day were a dutiful and unilluminating article published in 1940 in The American Alpine Journal and a more illuminating (but still brief) account by the leader of the expedition that appeared seventeen years later in Appalachia, the journal of the Appalachian Mountain Club.
Yet no K2 expedition—not even the vexed first ascent in 1954—ever provoked a storm of controversy comparable to the one that engulfed the 1939 climbers on their return home. As Galen Rowell writes in In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, his personal account of a star-crossed American attempt on K2’s northwest ridge in 1975, the 1939 expedition produced “the most bizarre tragedy in the history of Himalayan mountaineering.”
As is seldom true in climbing, the controversy was deeply enmeshed in the politics of the day. And the troubles that would afflict the 1939 team were set in motion even before the members left the United States, as Fritz Wiessner assumed leadership of the party.
In the winter of 1937–38 (as mentioned in the previous chapter), while he tried to assemble his K2 team, Charlie Houston suspected that Wiessner had deliberately put off his own expedition until the summer of 1939, in hopes that Houston’s party might pave his way with a thorough reconnaissance of the mountain. Whether or not Wiessner’s motives were so Machiavellian, that was exactly what happened, for in reaching 26,000 feet on the Abruzzi Ridge, Houston and his partners had demonstrated that K2 would best be climbed by that route.
Houston’s irritation was ratcheted up a notch when he began to suspect that Wiessner had already exacted pledges for the 1939 expedition from some of the best American climbers. In a letter to Bob Bates, Houston fumed,
Wiessner has asked him to go next year and Bill [House] thinks that would fit in better with his career. Bill makes number three that is not coming with us because Wiessner has extended hope of next year to him. I am so damn mad at Wiessner I have been aching to write him a fiery letter all day, but hope to restrain myself.
In the end, of course, House joined the 1938 team, which, ironically, meant that Wiessner’s friend and partner from the first ascent of Mount Waddington was not available for K2 in 1939.
The tragedy that would unfold that summer had everything to do with the makeup of the party. Besides Bill House, Wiessner hoped that Paul Petzoldt would be able to return to K2, but the fatal accident in India involving Petzoldt made that impossible. Through the winter of 1938–39, Wiessner doggedly lined up potential teammates. At one point, four very strong climbers were on board. Bestor Robinson had met Wiessner at the foot of Waddington, as part of a team of strong California rock climbers who had their own designs on the mountain. Wiessner had magnanimously given the Californians the first crack at Waddington. He and Bill House had made the first ascent only after Robinson’s crew turned back 600 feet below