K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [71]
The inability or unwillingness of four of the Americans to climb high put a huge amount of pressure on the Sherpa. Not only did they take the brunt of the load hauling, but as the weeks passed, they moved between camps more and more while unaccompanied by any “sahibs.” In 1938, as much as Houston trusted Pasang Kikuli, he never let him climb solo between camps. The Sherpa were always paired with at least one of the four leading Americans. Pretty much the same routine had been the norm on all the British Everest expeditions since 1922.
In 1939, the Sherpa also became message carriers. Rather than climb up to a high camp to confer with Wiessner, Durrance, since he was unable to acclimatize, would write a note to the leader and entrust it to a Sherpa. This sometimes unreliable communication system created its own confusion.
To Wiessner, the responsibility of the climbers lower on the mountain was simple and obvious: get those camps supplied! The whole logistical pyramid depended on a chain of well-stocked camps leading all the way up the Abruzzi Ridge to the Shoulder. That makes perfect sense to me, and I know that if I’d been in Durrance or Cromwell’s shoes, I’d have done my damnedest to get those loads up the mountain. If that’s the agreed-upon plan, you stick to it. But Kauffman and Putnam, as well as other critics, fault Wiessner at this point for not giving clear orders to the troops in the rear.
What else could Wiessner have done? If he hadn’t been out front pushing the route, nobody would have done it. Sheldon and Cranmer were out of action; Cromwell refused to go above Camp IV; Durrance could not adjust to the altitude; and Wolfe, though game and strong, didn’t have the skill or nerve to lead.
As they researched K2: The 1939 Tragedy, Kauffman and Putnam won the trust of Jack Durrance, who was eighty years old by the time the book was published. And they made a great breakthrough when Durrance let them read and quote from his 1939 diary—a privilege he had granted to no previous journalist. Those diary entries add a wealth of new information about the expedition, and Kauffman and Putnam’s use of them goes a long way toward exonerating Durrance from his role as the villain of the 1939 K2 saga, a view some of Wiessner’s defenders (and Wiessner himself) long held.
Yet in many ways, Durrance’s diary only deepens the mystery of what went wrong on the mountain. Its passages, which vacillate between hopefulness and despair, between enthusiasm and misery, do not neatly support any of the latter-day theories about what caused the tragedy. One thing the diary does document, however, is just how disheartened and homesick the four rearguard Americans had become even before the end of June. On June 26, Durrance wrote, “The most discussed topic is what we shall do when once again in civilization—a week’s stay in Srinagar—sightseeing in India (Taj Mahal, etc.).” As Kauffman and Putnam acknowledge, at this relatively early stage of the assault, with the scheduled return of the porters from Askole still almost a month in the future, “Eyes turned away from the hardships of K2 and toward the comforts of home.”
There’s a term some mountaineers use for this phenomenon. It’s called “crumping.” To crump is to let the hardship and danger of expedition life drain you of all your mountaineering ambitions, so that all you want to do is get the hell out of there. (It’s not a piece of jargon I grew up hearing, but after a climbing friend defined it for me, I thought it was pretty appropriate.) By the end of June, the four Americans lower on the mountain had crumped. It happens a lot on expeditions. And after crump sets in, you’ve psychologically thrown in the towel: you care only about going home, and you’ll make up all kinds of excuses as to why it makes sense to hike out early.
Meanwhile, Wiessner, Wolfe, and the best