K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [88]
That text for the first time lays out Wiessner’s version of the stripping of the camps and makes it clear that this dismantling was what wrecked the expedition and led indirectly to the deaths of Wolfe and the three Sherpa. In a single sentence, Wiessner summed up the personal impact of the tragedy. Had he and Pasang Lama found sleeping bags at Camp IV, he insists, he and Wolfe might have been able “to resume our final attack on the summit of which I felt so confident.” Instead, “a cruel fate determined otherwise, and therewith ended the hardest fight, the greatest hope, and at the same time the greatest disappointment of my climbing career.”
As few mountaineers ever do, Wiessner kept climbing at a very high level into his seventies and even early eighties, though he turned his talents away from the big ranges and toward rock climbing on smaller crags. Never again did he go on an expedition to the Karakoram or the Himalaya.
Beginning in the 1960s, and accelerating through the ‘70s and ‘80s, American climbing underwent a cultural revolution. A new generation, reexamining the 1939 expedition, saw armchair critics such as Kenneth Mason as reactionary old fogeys, while Wiessner was in effect reborn as one of the greatest climbers in history, his deeds on K2 considered heroic rather than foolish or neglectful.
In In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, Galen Rowell pithily summed up this reevaluation:
Leaders don’t belong in the first summit team? What about Maurice Herzog on Annapurna? Sherpas must not move unsupervised over difficult terrain? What about the repeated instances on many of the hallowed British attempts on Everest? Mountain summits aren’t worth risking lives for? Only a rare windless night on May 22, 1963, kept four Americans from perishing in an open bivouac near the top of Mount Everest…. Taking a climber of Wolfe’s meager experience on a big mountain was unprecedented? Andrew Irvine, Mallory’s famous companion on Mount Everest in 1924, was even less experienced, but like Wolfe he outperformed those with better records.
In 1966, Andy Kauffman, Bill Putnam, and several other AAC members persuaded Wiessner to rejoin the club. (It would be decades before Kauffman and Putnam would turn critical of the man they had so long admired and championed.) Soon afterward, in partial expiation of the wrong it had done him years before, the club made him an honorary member for life.
In December 1978, the annual AAC banquet meeting was held in Estes Park, Colorado. The previous summer, my friend Jim Wickwire and his three teammates had become the first Americans to reach the summit of K2. The whole focus of the meeting was to be on K2, and Jack Durrance, who was then living in Denver, was invited to give a slide show about the 1939 expedition. Hearing about this, Wiessner flew back from a meeting in Europe in order to be present.
I wasn’t there, but a friend of mine who was later recounted for me the dramatic events that took place. All day long, the rumors flew that a long-delayed confrontation was about to occur. Durrance was finally going to tell “his side” of the story. Meanwhile, Dee Molenaar, who had been on the 1953 K2 expedition, managed to talk Wiessner and Durrance into saying hello to each other. It was the first time they had seen each other since parting in India in 1939. The meeting was curt in the extreme.
A number of AAC old-timers took Durrance aside. They talked him out of making any inflammatory remarks. Whatever dirty laundry remained from 1939, they said, this was not the place to air it. Durrance gave in. His slide show carried the expedition up to base camp, then closed abruptly with a photo of himself in “retirement” in a cabin near the Tetons.
Later, at the banquet, Wiessner was given a