K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [76]
Even in the gathering night, the conditions were remarkably benign. It was windless, and at 27,000 feet Wiessner estimated the temperature to be between 23 and 27 degrees Fahrenheit. But the descent was difficult, requiring numerous rappels. (Although Wiessner never explained how the two men negotiated the terrain on the way down, I imagine that their very long “reserve rope” came in handy.) Pasang Lama was far less experienced at this sort of thing than Wiessner, and both men must have been pretty tired. As the Sherpa rappelled down an overhang, the rope running across his back got snagged on the crampons he carried strapped to the outside of his pack. With a furious effort, Lama disentangled the rope, but in the process he dislodged both pairs of crampons. Wiessner watched in dismay as these precious pieces of footgear tumbled into the void. That fluke mishap would make a huge difference during the following days.
The two men reached Camp IX at 2:30 A.M. They had been going for almost eighteen hours straight. To have descended 1,500 feet of difficult ground in the dark without an accident was an extraordinary achievement in its own right.
Wiessner and Lama slept late and took a rest day on July 20. The two men were mildly disappointed that none of the support party had arrived at Camp IX, but Wiessner did not yet suspect any serious disruption of his logistical pyramid. It was so warm in camp that for hours, Wiessner lay naked on top of his sleeping bag, taking what he quaintly called a “sun bath.” Unfazed by his setback on July 19, he was eager to make a second attempt the following day. In his 1956 account, Wiessner implied that Lama was equally psyched: “At three o’clock we felt fresh again, so that we decided to go to the summit the next day by the easterly route. I had no doubt of our success.” But only two paragraphs later he confessed, “Since the day before [Pasang Lama] had no longer been his old self; he had been living in great fear of the evil spirits, constantly murmuring prayers, and had lost his appetite.”
On July 21, the two men got off at 6:00 A.M., a much better start than they had managed two days earlier. Nowadays nearly everyone pitches a Camp IV somewhere directly on the Shoulder. From there the approach to the Bottleneck is a straightforward matter of climbing up the gradually steepening slope. From Wiessner’s Camp IX, however, a tricky right-ward traverse across the base of the rock bands was the first order of business. If a pair of men are climbing straight up, the leader can safely belay the second simply by taking in the rope. On a traverse, belaying is a much more delicate task. If Lama, coming second, had fallen off, he would have taken a wicked pendulum before the rope came tight to Wiessner. So, as he led, Wiessner had to place pitons at the more difficult moves simply to shorten the length of a potential fall for Pasang Lama. The traverse took a long time, and Wiessner described it in his diary as “disagreeable,” “difficult,” and “treacherous.”
It was still morning, however, when the two men reached the bottom of the Bottleneck. The snow here was so hard-crusted that Wiessner could not kick steps in it. All at once the significance of the loss of the crampons came home to him. As he later wrote, “With crampons, we could have practically run up [the couloir], but as it was we would have had to cut 300 or 400 steps. At these heights that would have taken more than a day.” Recognizing the futility of the task, Wiessner and the loyal Sherpa turned back to Camp IX once more.
When they arrived at the tent to find that still no teammates had come up, Wiessner began at last to suspect that something had gone wrong. Even so, he felt that there was still a good chance of climbing K2. Among the supplies being ferried up the mountain were spare pairs of crampons. And the weather was holding perfect.
On July 22, the two men headed down to Camp VIII. Wiessner’s plan was to pick up more food and gas and the all-important extra crampons, then return to Camp IX. If no crampons had arrived,