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I had no fear. All I was thinking was, how stupid this has to happen like this. Here we are, we can still do the mountain, and we have to lose out in this silly way and get killed forever….

But getting pulled around by the somersault and being first on the rope, it gave me a little time. I still had my ice axe—I always keep a sling around my wrist—and just in that moment the snow got a little softer. I had my axe ready and worked very hard with it. With my left hand I got hold of the rope, and eventually I got a stance, kicked in quickly, and leaned against the axe. Then, bang! A fantastic pull came. I was holding it well, but it tore me down. But at that time I was a fantastically strong man—if I had a third of it today I would be very happy. I stood there and I wanted to stop that thing. I must have done everything right, and the luck was there, too.

In the K2 annals—or, for that matter in the history of climbing in the Himalaya or the Karakoram—only Pete Schoening’s “miracle belay” in 1953 is more legendary than Wiessner’s self-arrest, which saved himself and his two teammates. I’d managed a similar self-arrest in 1992, after Scott got avalanched off and pulled me with him. That was tough enough, but there were only two of us on the rope, not three. And as big as he was, Scott was not as heavy as Dudley Wolfe.

As they approached Camp VII, the shaken men called down to the comrades they presumed were there, but they got no answer. It was dark by the time they arrived. And here the shock became incomprehensible.

Not only were there no teammates installed in Camp VII; the tents sagged, with their doors open. One was full of snow, the other half-collapsed. All the sleeping bags and air mattresses were gone. What was left of the food had been scattered wantonly in the snow outside the tents. It was as if the camp had been attacked by vandals. Wrote Wiessner in his diary, “What had been going on during the days when we were high—sabotage? We could not understand.”

Stunned and exhausted, the men cleaned out one tent, repitched it, and crawled inside. In the fall coming down from Camp VIII, Wolfe had lost his sleeping bag. That night the three men shared Pasang Lama’s single bag and air mattress. They endured a sleepless vigil that, as Wiessner wrote seventeen years later, “we shall never forget.”

It is a testament to Wiessner’s indomitable spirit that even after that wretched night, he still planned to go back up the mountain and make a third summit attempt. Surely there would be food and sleeping bags at Camp VI, and Wiessner calculated that there should be at least six Sherpa there as well. In the morning Pasang Lama and Wiessner got ready to go. Wolfe had decided to stay at Camp VII. Wiessner later explained the trio’s rationale:

With only one sleeping-bag we could not stay here in Camp VII, so we decided to go to Camp VI and fetch sleeping-bags from there. One of us, to be sure, could remain up here with Pasang’s sleeping-bag, get a rest, and so spare himself the trip down and up. Wolfe suggested that he stay, to recover from the unpleasant night and be in better shape to take a load to Camp VIII the day after tomorrow. As leader of the expedition I, myself, had to go down to Camp VI to get the support operations going again and find the explanation of the unheard-of occurrences. Pasang was to be relieved.

Later, Wiessner’s harshest critics would accuse him of abandoning Dudley Wolfe. Even Kauffman and Putnam, looking back from their vantage point of fifty-three years of hindsight, castigate Wiessner on this question:

The decision now made was to be the major cause of the ensuing tragedy. Fritz split his small party….

A cardinal rule of mountaineering, observed, certainly until recent years, is that under no circumstances does one split a small party if one has any reason to suspect trouble ahead….

Surely this was a time when three ambulatory men should have stuck together rather than separate. Indeed, if by some miracle, all was well below,