K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [74]
Durrance’s diary fails to explain why he took Kikuli down with him. Kauffman and Putnam interpret the action as springing from concern over Kikuli’s frostbite. But if so, why take the other Sherpa down as well? Even in his demoralized condition, Durrance must have realized that his precipitous descent with four Sherpa was sabotaging Wiessner’s plan.
Why did Kikuli accede to Durrance’s request? Wiessner drily wrote years later, “He was unhappy not to be given this job as planned.” “This job” was to stay at Camp VI and superintend the ferrying of loads higher on the mountain. Even though Kikuli was vastly more experienced than Durrance, the latter was still a “sahib”—and Sherpa took orders from sahibs even when they disagreed with them. But the best explanation for Kikuli’s heading down is that Durrance was by now in such bad shape that the Sherpa may have doubted whether he could make the trip by himself. Kauffman and Putnam partially agree: “Dawa [Thondup] and Kikuli, the latter with what appeared to be serious frostbite of his toes, because of which he could not stay high, had almost carried [Durrance] down the 2200 feet from Camp IV.”
At Camp II, Durrance found, in Kauffman and Putnam’s words, “three beaten men surrounded by unwashed pots and pans filled with the remnants of a ‘horrible stew concoction.’ … Rather than touch it, Jack threw it all out.” One of the three was Tony Cromwell, the by now almost useless “deputy leader.”
At Camp IX, of course, Wiessner was unaware of this breakdown lower on the mountain. On July 19, he and Pasang Lama set out at 9:00 A.M., determined to get to the summit. By today’s standards, that’s pretty late, but in the 1920s and ‘30s, nobody realized that the traditional “Alpine start”—getting off in the wee hours to take advantage of every daylight minute and of the predictably better weather in the morning, a practice regularly observed in the Alps, the Tetons, and the Rockies—might also make sense in the Himalaya and the Karakoram. And given the primitive clothing of the day—sweaters instead of down jackets, wool knickers instead of down pants, single leather boots—an Alpine start on a peak like K2 probably seemed too cold to contemplate. On Everest in both 1922 and 1924, no climber ever got started from a high camp earlier than 6:30 A.M.
Rather than traverse over to what would later be called the Bottleneck, menaced from above by that huge hanging serac, Wiessner at once tackled the rock cliffs. The amount of gear the two men carried puts our modern lightweight summit attempts to shame. Wiessner hefted a rucksack packed with pitons, carabiners, food, and extra clothing. Pasang Lama carried both men’s pairs of crampons as well as a sturdy “reserve rope,” three-eighths of an inch in diameter and an unimaginable 245 feet in length. The pair tied in with a 115-foot hemp rope that was a solid half inch in diameter—much thicker and heavier than any rope we would use today.
In light of what happened in August 2008, Wiessner’s avoidance of the Bottleneck looks like pretty canny mountaineering judgment. I suspect, though, that he was simply a lot more comfortable on rock than on snow and ice. As a teenager in Dresden, Wiessner had been part of a gang that put up what at the time were the hardest pure rock climbs in the world (though it would be decades before those men knew it). In the 1920s in the Alps, Wiessner’s two great first ascents, on the Fleischbank and the Furchetta, involved much more rock climbing than ice work. On the other hand, Mount Waddington, in British Columbia, of