K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [8]
In 1990, an acquaintance of mine, Greg Child, an outstanding Aussie mountaineer transplanted to the United States, climbed K2 by its north ridge, a considerably harder route than the Abruzzi. Recently I reread Greg’s account of the climb, published as “A Margin of Luck” in his collection of essays Mixed Emotions. Greg has a sardonic, even self-mocking style, so some of the things he writes in that piece may be tongue-in-cheek. Even so, it’s clear that he had a desperate time on summit day.
At 27,500 feet, only 750 feet below the top, Greg and his partners Greg Mortimer and Steve Swenson discussed what to do. It was already past 4:00 P.M.
Swenson looks down: “Should we go for it?” A long pause follows. Nothing could be more uncertain.
“Yes!” Mortimer finally shouts, prodding us into action and out of this inertia of doubt.
“This is crazy,” I think to myself. “A storm is moving in and we’re going for the summit, without oxygen, without bivouac gear.” But, I rationalize, this is our last shot at the mountain. If we go down now, we’ll never climb K2. A little more luck is all we need.
That exchange is incredibly similar to the one I had in 1992 with Scott and Charley as heavy snow began to fall. We, too, were above 27,000 feet. I remember asking, “Hey, what do you guys think?” “Whaddya mean?” Scott answered, and Charlie chimed in, “We’re going up!”
In 1990, Greg Child reached the summit only at 8:05 P.M. He didn’t start down until 9:00. That descent in the dark—”staggering, falling in the snow”—turned into what climbers mordantly call “an all-out epic.” Greg started to have hallucinations. Finding an empty oxygen cylinder in a circle of rocks, he fantasized:
I’m seeing an image in my mind of me hunkered among the rocks, warming my hands over a campfire. “That’s right,” I think, “I’ll build a fire down there. When Mortimer arrives we’ll get nice and warm.” I’ve got it all worked out.
Only 300 feet short of the tent, Greg became “completely apathetic” and collapsed. He literally crawled the last stretch to safety.
Man, I thought, as I reread Greg’s essay, that was scary, to go that long and that late. I wouldn’t have done that. Greg’s a really strong climber. A weaker mountaineer wouldn’t have survived.
Messner himself is famous for having wild hallucinations on the 8,000ers, especially when he was climbing alone. But I’ve always felt that if I started to hallucinate, I was doing something wrong.
The fourth member of Greg’s team in 1990, Phil Ershler, did turn back. And Ershler, as a senior guide at Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. (RMI), had been one of my most important mentors. On our own summit day in 1992, as I carried that knot in my gut and couldn’t make up my mind whether to go up or down, I kept thinking, Well, Ershler turned around.
As he headed down from the summit in August 2008, Alberto Zerain passed no fewer than eighteen climbers still going for the top. According to Men’s Journal:
Though he doesn’t speak English, [Zerain] claims he tried to tell the others that it was getting too late to continue. “As I descended,” he explains, “everyone stopped to ask me how far it was to the summit. Did I tell the people to turn around? No, you can’t. There are a lot of people, and they are all going up together. It’s the majority against you.”
(There’s a succinct definition of summit fever!)
Some of the climbers that day may well have pondered turning around. But one of the more experienced, the Italian Marco Confortola, tried to rally them onward. “I started shouting,” he later told reporters. “I told them that the first person to reach the summit of K2 [in 1954] did it at 6:00 P.M., so let’s move!”
At least one climber