K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [73]
Sadly, Pasang Kikuli was no longer at the front. On the push to Camp VII on July 12, he had suffered a recurrence of the frostbite that had first afflicted him on Nanga Parbat five years earlier. That evening, he stayed in Camp VI with the exhausted Durrance.
Having reached the lower edge of the Shoulder and set up Camp VIII on July 14, Wiessner sent Tse Tendrup and Pasang Kitar back down to Camp VII, where the team had already stockpiled “eleven loads of supplies.” Staying at Camp VIII were Wiessner, Wolfe, and Pasang Lama—after Kikuli, the strongest Sherpa on the mountain. There followed two days of light snow as the men rested. Then the weather turned fine again. On July 17, the three men set out carrying a tent, their sleeping bags and air mattresses, and food and fuel for seven days. Their goal was to establish a last camp at the upper end of the Shoulder, then launch the summit bid from there.
The going was agonizing, thanks to two days’ worth of new, soft snow that had piled up on the Shoulder. As he led, Wiessner sank into the powdery stuff up to his hips. Only 250 feet out of camp, the trio approached a bergschrund—a crevasse where the rocky core of the mountain is separated from the glacial mass that lies on top of it. Here the slope steepened, and though the crevasse itself was crossable on a snow bridge, the texture of the snow grew even softer and less stable. The snow bridge covered a gap of only twenty vertical feet, but it would take all the strength and skill Wiessner had to tame it. He would write in 1956:
After two hours of the hardest conceivable work I succeeded, almost by swimming, in getting up across the snow-bridge and then treading out a belaying stance on the steep slope above the bridge…. Pasang Lama followed in my trench but almost disappeared in the snow before he reached me; he too needed an hour. Now came Wolfe, by far the heaviest of us three. He was not able to master this place and suggested that he return to Camp VIII, only 100 steps away, and follow us with one or more of the supporting party the next day, when the tracks would have become firmer.
As Wolfe returned to Camp VIII, the other two men continued above, always with Wiessner breaking trail. Worn out from floundering in the deep snow, the pair pitched a temporary camp at 25,700 feet. The next day they pushed on. Wiessner had taken careful note of the “great ice cliff” that hangs over the Bottleneck couloir and the Shoulder, and he did not like the looks of it. On July 18, he and Pasang Lama crossed a field of scattered ice blocks—avalanche debris that had fallen from the cliff, the very same serac that would collapse in 2008. So Wiessner angled upward toward the left, leaving the Shoulder as he headed toward a band of rock cliffs, out of the line of fire of what I would later call the Motivator. By late that afternoon, the two men had pitched their tent on a solid snow platform, protected by the rock bands above. By Wiessner’s estimate, they were at 26,050 feet. The camp was even a little bit higher than our Camp IV in 1992. Wrote Wiessner later, “The view from this spot was inconceivably magnificent.”
By now, he was confident of success. On July 12, when Durrance had turned back to Camp VI, he and Wiessner had explicitly discussed their plans for the following days. There was no communications gap. As Wiessner later summarized the plan, “On July 14 Durrance was to attempt to climb to Camp VII with four Sherpas and if possible join us again higher up; in case he should not feel well he had only to send the Sherpas on up.” The agreement between Wiessner and Pasang Kikuli was equally clear. Since the best Sherpa could no longer hope to reach the summit, “his wish now was only to oversee the final support operations between Camps VI and VII.”
At Camp IX, 2,200 feet below the summit, Wiessner and Lama had six days of food and plenty of fuel. Beneath him on the mountain, Wiessner assumed, was a continuous string of well-stocked camps, the logistical pyramid he had designed from the start.
But things had not gone quite as planned.