K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [66]
The symptoms sound like those of pulmonary edema, but they could also fit any number of other illnesses with pulmonary symptoms. If you combine traveling through a third-world country with the plagues of high altitude, you can come down with all sorts of maladies that people have rarely heard of. I’ve had to deal with teammates who were suddenly afflicted with pulmonary edema, though usually at much higher altitudes—Gary Ball at 26,000 feet on K2, for instance. Cranmer had succumbed at an altitude of only 16,500 feet. On the other hand, pulmonary edema has been known to strike victims at altitudes as low as 10,000 feet. The odd thing about the condition is that it can happen to anyone—previous experience on high mountains seems irrelevant. So does the kind of shape you’re in. J.-C. Lafaille got it in 2003 as we summited on Broad Peak and had a really hard time getting down the mountain. Only two weeks before, we had climbed Nanga Parbat together, and J.-C. had also reached the summit of Dhaulagiri just before that. I thought that on Broad Peak he would have been so well acclimatized as to be basically immune to altitude-related illness, but that’s not how it works. I’m just lucky that neither pulmonary nor cerebral edema has ever laid me low.
In 1939, pulmonary edema was virtually unknown. Durrance diagnosed Cranmer’s malady as either pneumonia or “cardiac decompensation.” There was little he could do for his patient except hold his head, keep him warm, try to clean him up, and give him such medicines as phenobarbitol, a sedative. We know today (as Durrance could not) that the most important thing to do to save the life of a victim of either kind of edema is to get him at once to a lower altitude. If that’s not possible, all you can do is put the victim on supplemental oxygen. Even if the 1939 party had known about the importance of getting to a lower altitude at once, it would not have been an easy task. Descending the glacier, they would have lost altitude only very gradually. Cranmer could not walk, so the men would have had to improvise a litter.
Cranmer slowly recovered, but he was essentially out of action as the team started up the Abruzzi Ridge. Meanwhile, the five healthy climbers and the strongest Sherpa began to build a logistical pyramid of well-stocked camps. By June 21, the team had established its Camp IV just beneath House’s Chimney. Learning from their predecessors’ frightening experience, Wiessner’s crew avoided camping on the 20,700-foot platform where the 1938 party’s tents had been bombarded by rocks kicked loose from above. Instead, the 1939 team used that nook only as a supply depot.
Wiessner always claimed that he had made a real effort to get along with Durrance from the start. In 1984, he told a writer:
I knew Jack as a great sportsman, and I knew he was strong. He’d done some climbing in Munich when he lived there, and he had good climbs in the Tetons. But I also knew he was very competitive, which might cause troubles. Actually, at that time I liked Durrance, and hoped he could do well.
But tensions between the two men began to spark only a day or two after the team reached base camp. To the same writer, Wiessner recounted an unhappy conflict:
On our first trip up the glacier, I wanted to check a little bit on safety and roping. We had two ropes. Soon Jack’s rope started to put up speed, trying to go faster than the others. Cromwell and Wolfe said to me, “What’s up? Do we have to do this running?” When we got back to base camp, I gave a long talk. I said, “Look, fellows, I can tell you right now, we will never climb this mountain if there’s competition between the members. Get it out of your head. We have to work really hard and work together.” Jack didn