K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [84]
No trace of Pasang Kitar, Phinsoo, or Pasang Kikuli has ever been found.
On the march out to Srinagar, the rearguard party—Wiessner, Durrance, and most of the Sherpa—never caught up to the Cromwell-Cranmer-Sheldon contingent, which had joined forces at Askole. In 1984, Wiessner recalled that hike out:
We were together every day. Durrance looked after me as if I were a baby. He made pancakes for me. And every day we talked. I just couldn’t comprehend what had happened on the mountain. “I don’t understand it, Jack,” I told him, “why those sleeping bags were taken out after all our agreements.” He kept answering, “It was a matter of those Sherpas.”
I kept asking him. Finally, he stood there and shouted, “Ah, Fritz! Stop it! Stop it! We have talked about it long enough!”
In Srinagar, Wiessner and Durrance lingered while they painstakingly drafted an official account of the expedition for the American Alpine Club. There they were also interviewed by the American Consul to India, Edward Miller Groth, who, though not a mountain climber, prepared his own analysis of the expedition in a memorandum addressed not to the AAC but to the State Department in Washington, D.C.
It was not until September 20 that Wiessner and Durrance finally separated, as the former boarded a ship for New York. On that day, Durrance wrote in his diary, “Fritz & I part ways, thank God.”
Tony Cromwell had preceded Wiessner to the States. Upon disembarking in New Jersey, Cromwell publicly leveled the ridiculous charge that Wiessner had “murdered” Dudley Wolfe. Greeted in New York by reporters armed with Cromwell’s claim, Wiessner rashly told the New York Times that “on big mountains, as in war, one must expect casualties.”
Wiessner had not recovered from the ordeal of K2. In New York City he entered a hospital, where he was bedridden for six weeks, as doctors treated severe arthritic problems in his knees and chronic back pain. Durrance later came to New York, stayed in a hotel, and sent some of Wiessner’s belongings to him in the hospital, but he never paid a visit. The two men would not meet again for thirty-nine years.
In his bed, Wiessner brooded about the stripped camps. He had come to accept that the removal of sleeping bags from Camps VI and VII was due to Tendrup’s false report that the three men above must have died in an avalanche. But what explained the stripping of the vital supplies—including thirteen sleeping bags—from Camps II and IV? Had Wiessner found everything in place at Camp IV, he believed, he could still have gone back up the mountain and made a third attempt on the summit. And Dudley Wolfe would not have died—which would have meant that the three Sherpa also would not have died.
As he lay in his hospital bed, rummaging through his personal papers, Wiessner later reported, he came across a handwritten note that he had earlier overlooked. It had been left for him by Durrance at Camp II on July 19. The note, as Wiessner recalled, congratulated him and Wolfe for making the summit, then explained that he, Durrance, had ordered the recovery of the sleeping bags, in anticipation of the expedition’s departure and to save valuable equipment. The implication was that Durrance assumed that Wiessner, Wolfe, and Pasang Lama would be bringing their own bags down all the way from Camp IX. When Wiessner had found this note at Camp II on July 23, he had been too exhausted and upset to make sense of it. Now, in the hospital, it seemed to supply the missing piece to the puzzle.
Wiessner later wrote that he deposited this all-important note in the files of the American Alpine Club. When he subsequently