K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [63]
Al Lindley, a Yale graduate from Minnesota, had made the second ascent of Mount McKinley in 1932; he was also an expert ski mountaineer. Sterling Hendricks had perfected the art of lightweight assaults on remote and little-known mountains, particularly in western Canada. Roger Whitney, yet another Yalie, had learned to climb in the Alps, and had made first ascents in Alaska, Canada, and the Tetons.
On paper, then, Wiessner’s party boasted plenty of skill and experience. At various times through the spring of 1939, however, all four of those strong teammates backed out of the expedition. Some of Wiessner’s critics later tried to see those defections as rooted in a distrust of Wiessner’s leadership, but I don’t buy it. In those days, nobody could make a living from mountain climbing. All those guys had jobs they couldn’t sacrifice: Whitney was a physician, Hendricks a biochemist, and Lindley and Robinson were lawyers. Then, as now, an expedition to K2 was an expensive undertaking. Climbers often back out of such trips after they’ve made a tentative commitment to them. Look at our own K2 team in 1992: Scott went from having so many teammates lined up—that he had to put me on the waiting list—to heading off to Pakistan with only me as a partner.
In the end, Wiessner had to scrounge among casual friends he had met climbing or skiing. And he was swayed to include relatively inexperienced candidates whose deep pockets could help pay the cost of the expedition. The pivotal figure in this roster was Dudley Wolfe, a near millionaire from Boston. After graduating from Harvard, Wolfe had become an expert in long-distance sailing races, as well as a competent skier. But he had taken up climbing only in 1936. By 1939, he was overweight and forty-four years old. According to Andrew Kauffman and William Putnam, the authors of K2: The 1939 Tragedy—published in 1992, it remains the only book-length chronicle of the expedition—Wolfe “required more than one guide [in the Alps] to haul his large bulk to the summits…. He was not accustomed to making decisions in the mountains and could move over difficult terrain only with the guidance and help of others.” Wolfe’s funding may have been the chief reason why Wiessner invited him to K2, but on the mountain, against all odds, he would perform better than all the other Americans (except, of course, Wiessner himself).
Forty-two-year-old Eaton (“Tony”) Cromwell was also a blueblood with access to money. Like Wolfe, he had climbed mostly with guides. As Kauffman and Putnam sardonically put it, Cromwell’s “main climbing qualifications for candidacy on the 1939 expedition consisted of the longest, but not most distinguished, list of mountain ascents of any member of the American Alpine Club; and there is some reason to believe that no one ever attempted to surpass this record, much less to boast of it.” Cromwell, in other words, was what we climbers dismissively call a “peak bagger.”
In the 1930s, forty-four and forty-two were pretty advanced ages for climbers attempting K2. But Wiessner, at thirty-nine, was at the top of his alpine game, and that summer he was, by his own report, in the best shape of his life. He had reached 23,000 feet on Nanga Parbat in 1932, and his record of technical first ascents in Europe and the United States was unmatched by any other American.
The party was rounded out by two Dartmouth students. Chappell Cranmer had shared part of a single season with Wiessner in the Canadian Rockies, but the bulk of his experience consisted of weekends on New England crags and slogs up easy peaks in Colorado. His classmate George Sheldon was even less experienced, with only two seasons in the Tetons under his belt, during which he seconded routes led by more accomplished climbers. Both Dartmouth boys were only twenty years old.
As the team sailed for Europe in March, it must have been obvious to