K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [70]
Meanwhile, on June 30, after nine days at Camp IV, Wiessner started up House’s Chimney. The fixed ropes left by the 1938 party had frozen into the slope, and in any event, Wiessner was not willing to count on them. (Even in a single year’s worth of freezing and fraying in the wind, fixed ropes—especially the old hemp ones—become dangerously fragile. I’ve never completely trusted ropes left on 8,000ers by parties from previous years.)
So Wiessner led the pitch the same way his old partner Bill House had the year before, and it took him two hours (only half an hour less) to gain those critical 80 feet. In The American Alpine Journal article, he later saluted his friend’s 1938 effort: “I can only commend House for his ability in having originally led up this piece of difficult rock climbing.”
On top of the cliff, Wiessner strung a new fixed rope. Then, with the aid of strenuous hauling on the climbing rope, he got both Pasang Kikuli and Dudley Wolfe up the chimney. Wiessner was a slight man, wiry and only five feet six inches tall. Kikuli was also slight, but Wolfe was a big hulk of a fellow, and a clumsy climber to boot, so it must have taken a prodigious effort even for two men to drag him up the nearly vertical cliff. The trio pitched Camp V at 22,000 feet, reusing the platforms built up by the 1938 party. Then they waited out two more days of storm.
In this way, the team started to fragment. Down below, the Dartmouth students, Cranmer and Sheldon, of whom Wiessner had expected great things, had effectively thrown in the towel. Cromwell, whom Wiessner had appointed to the rather nominal role of deputy leader, had been intimidated from the start by the difficulty and the danger of the climbing on the Abruzzi. Now he declared that under no condition would he go above Camp IV. Only Durrance, among the American climbers below Camp V, still had any heart for the ascent. But he had been hampered all along by having to use old, lightweight boots, after a custom-made pair ordered from a Munich store had failed to arrive. When the new boots finally made their surprise appearance, carried up to base camp along with the mail by porters from Askole, Durrance was overjoyed. But thereafter, despite numerous attempts, he found it impossible to acclimatize. Even at only 20,000 feet, he would have to stop and pant desperately, crouched over with his hands on his knees. During the rest of the expedition, he would never climb higher than 600 feet above Camp VI, which was at 23,400 feet, below the Black Pyramid.
On our own K2 expedition in 1992, we had team members who seemed to lose heart for the project after they’d been on the mountain for a month. It’s all too easy to let one’s initial gung-ho enthusiasm evaporate in the face of storms and setbacks. In its place, a powerful longing to get the hell out of there and head for home takes over. That’s why I’ve always (and especially on K2) psyched myself up beforehand, to the point where I was willing to spend as long as it took on the mountain to get a chance to climb it. By June 30, the 1939 team had been at base camp or above for exactly one month. Already Sheldon, Cranmer, and Cromwell were, it seems, ready to go home, and it would not be long before Durrance was of the same mind.
So the two halves of the party began to separate—a disconnection that would have everything to do with the coming tragedy. Later, Wiessner would be severely criticized for allowing a communications gap to develop between the climbers up high and those waiting below. Some “experts” would fault him for not bringing along radios. But the 1938 team had had no radios, and it would be several years before these devices really became practical on mountains like K2.
Kauffman and Putnam admit that in 1939, intercamp radios were both exorbitantly heavy and unreliable. But they react to Wiessner’s later statement that he had chosen to do without radios “for ideological reasons” with yet