• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Was this the decision of a leader fully in command of his faculties?

I don’t know where Kauffman and Putnam got their “cardinal rules of mountaineering,” but this analysis, like their theory that the expedition leader should not be the same person as the “point man,” seems cockeyed. If Wolfe was too tired to push farther down the mountain on July 23, what was Wiessner supposed to do? Sit and wait at Camp VII—three men with a single sleeping bag and air mattress—for help that would never come? Order Wolfe to descend, no matter how wiped out he was? Far from abandoning his teammate, Wiessner tried to spare him a further ordeal. It did not seem possible that Camp VI could have been destroyed as Camp VII had been. To me, what Wiessner did seems perfectly logical.

Wiessner and Lama did not depart until 11:00 A.M. on the July 23. And 700 feet lower, the inconceivable became reality. Not only were there no Sherpa in Camp VI, but the two tents had been taken down and folded up. Some gasoline and a little bit of food were cached there, but the sleeping bags and air mattresses were gone.

“Our situation now became very serious,” Wiessner later wrote. The two men had no choice but to continue the descent. At Camps V and IV, still no sleeping bags. The Camp III depot was empty. At nightfall, Wiessner and Lama reached Camp II, which ought to have been the best-provisioned on the mountain. No sleeping bags! Utterly worn out, the two men took down one tent and wrapped themselves up in it while they tried to sleep in the other. Their fingers and toes got frost-nipped, and for the second night in a row, they got no sleep.

In the morning, Wiessner and Pasang Lama staggered down the lower slopes of the Abruzzi Ridge and at last emerged on the Godwin Austen Glacier. Base camp was still several miles away. Wiessner later wrote, “For the last kilometers on the nearly level glacier we could only just drag ourselves along, and often we fell to the ground.” Finally, with base camp almost in sight, they saw four tiny figures in the distance—teammates at last. Slowly the gap between those figures and the two utterly spent climbers closed.

This is the great mystery. Why were the tents stripped? While Wiessner, Pasang Lama, and Dudley Wolfe were pushing hard for the summit, what was going on below Camp VIII? What had happened to the other four Americans, and to the rest of the Sherpa?

As the figures on the glacier drew near, Wiessner recognized Tony Cromwell and three Sherpa. The first thing Cromwell said was “Thank God you’re alive!”

By now, with his throat desperately sore from breathing thin, cold air, Wiessner had lost his voice, a condition that would last for weeks. But in a rasping whisper, he summoned up his fury: “What is the idea?”

Wiessner later recalled his deputy leader’s explanation: “He told us they had given us up for dead. He was just out looking for any sign of anything on the glacier. I said, ‘This is really an outrage. Wolfe will sue you for your neglect.’”

In silence, the six men plodded the short distance to base camp. According to Wiessner,

The cook and the liaison officer came out and embraced me and took me to my tent. Pasang Kikuli and all the Sherpas came and embraced me. But Durrance didn’t come for about half an hour.

When he did, I said immediately, “What happened to our supplies? Who took all the sleeping bags down? And why were they taken down?”

Durrance said, “Well, the Sherpas….” It was blamed on the Sherpas.

Wiessner was surprised to discover that the two Dartmouth boys, George Sheldon and Chappell Cranmer, were nowhere to be seen. It turned out that they had left base camp on July 18. After seven weeks on the Godwin Austen Glacier, they were so fed up with the expedition—or simply overwhelmed by K2’s challenges—that they did not even bother to hang around to find out what was happening with their three teammates high on the mountain. The pretext for their early departure: a geology side trip back