K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [83]
Despite his frostbitten feet, the sirdar and his companion were so fit and committed that they climbed at a rate of almost 1,000 feet an hour—virtually unheard of at such altitudes. In only six hours they reached Camp IV, a gain of 5,000 feet. There, to their surprise, they did not find Kitar and Phinsoo. It turned out that Kitar had overcome his doubts and the two Sherpa left by Durrance at IV had pushed on to Camp VI. So Kikuli and Tsering pushed on themselves. In a single day, they climbed 6,900 feet, from base camp at 16,500 feet to Camp VI at 23,400. Theirs was the strongest single day’s ascent performed to that date by any climbers on any 8,000-meter peak.
From base camp, at 11:00 A.M. on July 29, through binoculars, Durrance and Wiessner saw three men climbing a couloir between Camps VI and VII. They were too far away to identify, and soon they passed out of sight. At 5:00 P.M., Durrance and Wiessner saw three figures descending the same couloir. It was impossible to deduce what had gone on.
At noon on July 29, Pasang Kikuli, Phinsoo, and Kitar reached Camp VII. (Tsering had been left at Camp VI to prepare hot beverages.) The three Sherpa found Wolfe lying in his sleeping bag, completely apathetic. He did not even read the note Wiessner had written to him. He had again run out of matches, and had eaten or drunk nothing for days. He had not even gone outside to defecate, so his sleeping bag and the tent floor were smeared with feces. The Sherpa made tea for Wolfe, got him outside the tent, and tried to help him walk, but he could only stagger. Wolfe told the men that he needed another day of rest, and pleaded with them to come back for him the next day.
Kauffman and Putnam write,
Dudley had spent thirty-eight consecutive days above 22,000 feet, most of them in a tent. Of these, sixteen had been at heights averaging 25,000 feet. In the history of mountaineering to that time, no man—not Noel Odell of Everest, not Fritz himself—has been known to remain at such heights so long—even with oxygen support. And few have done it since.
So the three Sherpa turned back and descended to Camp VI. It is a tribute to their extraordinary devotion that they still did not give up on Dudley Wolfe. They stayed in their tent on July 30, as a minor storm blew through.
On July 31, Pasang Kikuli, Kitar, and Phinsoo started up to Camp VII once more. They again left Tsering behind to brew up tea for their return.
Tsering waited all day, a pot of tea ready, but no one came. He waited at Camp VI all the next day. Finally, on August 2, in a terrified panic, he dashed down to base camp.
We will never know what happened on July 31. It may be that the three Sherpa were avalanched off the mountain between Camps VI and VII, or that one fell and pulled the other two off. In 1939, the survivors thought it was conceivable that the Sherpa had reached Wolfe and rallied him into descending, only to have all four men meet disaster on the way down.
On August 3, with two Sherpa, Wiessner made one more attempt to ascend the route. It took him two full days to, as he put it, “drag myself” up to Camp II. He was incapable of going higher. On August 5 a full-scale storm broke, dumping more than a foot of snow and ending any further hopes of going up the mountain. Two days later what was left of the expedition team started out for Askole.
Dudley Wolfe’s body was discovered on the Godwin Austen Glacier in 2002. Curiously enough, ten years earlier we’d stumbled upon what may have been one of Wolfe’s hobnailed leather boots, near our base camp. The boot contained the remnants of ankle bones and sock material. But in the aftermath of our rescue of Gary Ball, the boot somehow got forgotten.
In 2002, two documentary filmmakers from a Spanish expedition first came across bones from a leg and a pelvis. That team was led by Araceli Segarra, who had been a key member of our IMAX team on Everest in 1996. Shortly thereafter, the Spaniards