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By Root 1162 0

Wiessner that he was the leader of perhaps the weakest team to that date ever to attempt an 8,000er—much less the formidable K2. Executives of the American Alpine Club, which officially sponsored the expedition, were so apprehensive that at the last minute they recruited a sixth man, Jack Durrance. A twenty-six-year-old Dartmouth medical student, Durrance had become a first-rate rock climber in the Bavarian Alps after his family had moved to Munich. Back in the States, he worked three summers as a guide in the Tetons, where he compiled a record of first ascents in that spiky range that was second only to Petzoldt’s. His finest climb was the first ascent of the north face of Grand Teton—with Petzoldt and Petzoldt’s brother, Eldon. On that daunting route, Durrance led the hardest pitches.

Durrance should have been a powerful addition to the party, but for strange reasons, it would not work out that way. He caught up with his teammates in Genoa, where they all boarded a steamship for India. And from that moment on, things started to go wrong.

Wiessner had not been notified of the addition of Durrance to the party. In Genoa, he was expecting to meet Bestor Robinson, who had backed out only after the other five climbers had sailed for Europe. Greeting Durrance, Wiessner could not suppress his shock and dismay, and Durrance was badly hurt by his leader’s reaction. In his diary, Durrance wrote a few weeks later, “Can’t quite forget Fritz’s look of disappointment at finding insignificant Jack filling Bestor Robinson’s boots.”

On all thirty of my expeditions to 8,000ers, I don’t think I ever joined a party as weak as that 1939 team. There were plenty of feeble performers among the Americans in 1992 on K2, as I kept complaining to my diary, but we also had enough strong guys—particularly Scott, Charley Mace, and Neal Beidleman—to put together a decent summit effort. In 1939, Wiessner was the only member of the team who had ever previously been on a mountain in the great ranges, whether in Alaska, the Andes, the Himalaya, or the Karakoram. It’s hard for me to say, particularly given the half-century gap between Wiessner’s era and mine, but I think that if I had found myself part of a party with as little collective experience as that one, I’d have backed out. And if I’d been the leader, I might have called off the whole endeavor.

Inexperienced teammates can get you in trouble on a serious mountain. John Roskelley, the best American high-altitude climber of the 1980s and my teammate on Kangchenjunga in 1989, had an ironclad principle that he would never jumar up a fixed rope that had been anchored by someone else. He didn’t trust any teammate to fix those anchors the way he trusted himself. (I’m not so adamant about this myself, but I respect Roskelley’s stubborn self-reliance.)

Inexperience among the teammates on the 1939 expedition would contribute directly to the tragedy. But there’s no evidence that Wiessner ever thought of calling off the show. For one thing, he had an ace up his sleeve: he had recruited nine Sherpa in advance. Five of them were returning from Houston’s expedition of the previous year: Pasang Kikuli, Phinsoo, and Tse Tendrup, who had all carried loads high on the Abruzzi; Pemba Kitar, who had performed the extraordinary errand of dashing down to Askole to recruit porters to carry firewood up to base camp; and Sonam. Rounding out the Sherpa contingent were Pasang Lama, who would play a pivotal role on the ‘39 expedition, Tsering, Dawa Thondup, and Pasang Kitar.

If the American team was weak, the nine Sherpa amounted to as strong a cast as had ever signed on for an expedition to an 8,000er. It is no exaggeration to say that in 1939, Pasang Kikuli was the most experienced high-altitude climber in the world, with six previous expeditions to 8,000ers (seven if you count Nanda Devi, which is just under 8,000 meters). Kikuli had seen tragedy before, on Nanga Parbat in 1934, when eight climbers died after getting trapped in a storm high on the mountain. (That and the equally catastrophic 1937 Nanga Parbat expedition