K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [75]
Even so, Wiessner evidently underestimated the difficulty of those rock bands. No one since 1939 has ever climbed them again, so it is impossible to give them an objective rating of difficulty. For nine hours, Wiessner climbed the rock bands, hammering in pitons as he went. Lama belayed him on every pitch. In succession, Wiessner mastered a short couloir of black ice, a short overhang of iced-up rock, and many rope lengths of shattered, friable rock, much of it covered with a treacherous skin of ice called verglas. In the face of several unclimbable obstacles he backed off, traversing right or left to find the way. The climbing was so difficult that Wiessner often had to take off his mittens to seize holds bare-handed; but the air was so calm and the temperature warm enough that he didn’t risk frostbite.
Some of the pitches Wiessner later rated as sixth class—as hard as anything that had yet been done in the Alps. All this above 26,000 feet, without bottled oxygen! The climbing on those rock bands was harder by far than anything yet attempted on Everest, Kangchenjunga, or Nanga Parbat. It was harder by far than House’s Chimney or the Black Pyramid. It’s not easy to judge other people’s climbs, but I’d venture to say that nothing of comparable difficulty at such an altitude would be performed by anybody during the next nineteen years, until Walter Bonatti and Carlo Mauri’s brilliant first ascent of Gasherbrum IV in 1958.
At 6:30 P.M., with the sun nearing the horizon, Wiessner faced only an easy 25-foot traverse to the summit snowfield. He had reached 27,500 feet, only 750 feet below the summit. The snowfield promised relatively nontechnical climbing. K2 was in the bag.
But as he started to move on, Wiessner felt the rope come tight. He looked down. Pasang Lama smiled almost apologetically. “No, sahib, tomorrow,” he said. As a Buddhist lama, Pasang believed that evil spirits hovered about the summit of K2 at night.
For a few moments, Wiessner contemplated unroping and going for the top solo. None of the highest mountains in the world had ever been climbed solo, let alone on a push through the night. But the weather was holding perfect, and a nearly full moon would illuminate the darkness.
Yet he could not abandon his partner. With a heavy heart, Wiessner turned back. He knew, however, that he and Lama had enough gear and food at Camp IX to make a second attempt the next day or the day after. As he had climbed the rock bands, Wiessner had studied the couloir and the ice cliff to the right. The Bottleneck (as it would later be named) now looked well within his capabilities, and the hanging serac seemed more stable than he had initially thought. On the next try, Wiessner would tackle that route, almost all of which was on snow and ice. It was bound to be easier than the 1,500 feet of mixed ground and rock cliffs he had so expertly solved on this first attempt.
Slowly, as night fell, the men rappeled down the complicated route, using pitons Wiessner pounded into the rock for anchors. “Many times during that descent,” he later wrote, “I regretted intensely that I had not insisted on continuing over that last traverse.”
Wiessner’s admirers over the years have argued that if anybody could have pushed on to the summit, reached it after dark, and descended by moonlight, it would have been he. But I disagree. If Wiessner had gone on with Pasang Lama, I think it could very well have turned into another Mallory and Irvine—two incredibly bold and determined climbers vanishing in the mists. If Wiessner had gone on alone, I don’t think he would have survived. And left alone on a small ledge at 27,500 feet, unable to descend on his own, Pasang Lama would surely have frozen to death. In turning back, Wiessner made the right decision. And in refusing to abandon his partner, he did the morally responsible thing. I admire him more for that than if he had reached