K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [80]
The porters from Askole had arrived on schedule on July 23. Now they were lingering around base camp, eager to go home. In retrospect, this state of affairs is surprising. Although Askole was a seven-day march from base camp for heavily laden porters, the team had had intermittent contact with that last outpost of civilization. On June 28, for instance, porters had arrived with the mail and Durrance’s custom-made boots. As the July 23 deadline approached, with the ascent of the mountain still very much in progress, it ought to have been possible for Cromwell to send a messenger to Askole, delaying the arrival of the porters. After all, in 1938, the cook and one Sherpa had dashed down to that village in only three days, as they organized the team’s firewood-gathering mission.
In 1992, we waited until we were finally down the mountain before we ordered our porters. We did not want to risk having them arrive before we were sure that our entire team was done with its attempt. Once the porters return to base camp, the expedition is effectively over. That meant we had to hang around on the Godwin Austen Glacier longer than we might have liked—by the end of August, even I was ready to go home.
The obvious explanation for Cromwell’s allowing the porters to show up while three men were still high on K2 is that all the “sahibs” except Wiessner and Wolfe were desperate to get the hell out of there. “Crump” had set in with a vengeance. Cranmer and Sheldon had not even bothered to wait for the porters, they were so eager to leave base camp. It’s a scary thought, but you can’t help wondering whether Cromwell, having given up for dead the three men high on the mountain, might have pulled the plug on the whole expedition and started hiking out even before Wiessner and Pasang Lama got down to base camp, if he had returned empty-handed from his July 24 search of the glacier for signs of the missing men. Wiessner believed that to be the case. In 1956, with wry irony, he wrote, “At Base Camp, in the firm conviction that Wolfe, Pasang and I had perished, it had been decided to begin the march out on July 25. This plan had to be altered somewhat when Pasang Lama and I dragged ourselves into camp.”
Something very similar to this happened on the 1963 American Everest expedition. The goal of team leader Norman Dyhrenfurth, and of most of the climbers in the nineteen-man party, was simply to make the first American ascent of the world’s highest mountain. (In that sense, the ‘63 campaign was a holdover from the 1950s era of massive nationalistic expeditions.) That goal was accomplished on May 1, when Jim Whittaker topped out with Sherpa Nawang Gombu. Meanwhile, a small contingent made up of the best technical climbers on the team set out to put up a new route on Everest’s west ridge. Dyhrenfurth relegated this splinter group to second-class status, directing all the team’s logistics and support to the effort on the traditional South Col route. The west ridge group had to bide their time and haul their own loads until Whittaker and Gombu had succeeded. But by then, Dyhrenfurth and most of the climbers on the South Col route were ready to go home.
This rather nasty impasse came to a head on May 9 in a radio exchange between Tom Hornbein, installed high on the west ridge, and Barry Prather at base camp, who spoke for Dyhrenfurth because the leader had developed severe laryngitis. In his classic narrative, Everest: The West Ridge, Hornbein replays that exchange verbatim (it had been tape-recorded for use in the expedition’s documentary film):
Prather: The porters are coming in on the 21st and we’re leaving Base Camp on the 22nd. Over….
Hornbein: O.K., we realize time is running out but we envisioned that there were a few more days beyond the 20th or 21st so far as summit attempts by our route are concerned…. How do you read that? Over.
Prather: Only comment is, there are 300 porters coming in