K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [90]
My friend used to be an English professor. He explained, “This kind of thing happens a lot in biography. The classic example is Lawrance Thompson’s bio of Robert Frost. Frost chose Thompson to be his official biographer, and he lived so long that the research covered decades. Frost was every bit as imperious as Wiessner. There are stories about how he would call up Thompson from his retirement home in Florida and say something like, ‘Come on down—I’m ready to tell you about 1913.’ By the time Thompson wrote the biography, he hated Frost. In that three-volume life, Frost comes across as a great poet but a monster in human terms. One reviewer called it ‘a big fat voodoo doll of a biography, with Thompson puncturing Frost from every angle.’ But that’s still the public image of Frost, which no amount of later scholarship has been able to undo.”
No matter what the ultimate causes of the tragedy were, any climber has to be in complete awe of Wiessner’s performance on K2. To lead virtually every pitch of the whole climb, to break trail through the deepest and softest snow every single day, to have established a well-stocked series of camps all the way up the mountain with only minimal support from his American teammates, to have used his ax belay and self-arrest to save the lives of his teammates twice, to have done the hardest climbing so far accomplished anywhere at such an altitude in order to reach a point only 750 vertical feet below the summit, to be ready to go through the night to get to the top—there’s really nothing like it in the annals of mountaineering in the great ranges.
And you have to be in awe of the hard work, the loyalty, and the heroism of the Sherpa—particularly Pasang Kikuli, Pasang Kitar, and Phinsoo, who gave their lives trying to save Dudley Wolfe.
I’ve heard guys say that if Wiessner had reached the summit of K2 in 1939, with or without Pasang Lama, it would have been the greatest accomplishment in mountaineering history. I agree—but in my opinion, that feat would have been nearly impossible. In the years since 1939, such a tour de force has been performed on rare occasions, but more often climbers pushing their limits to such extremes don’t survive the ordeal.
I get asked all the time whether I think Mallory and Irvine reached the summit of Everest in 1924. I always answer, “It doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant, because they didn’t make it back down.” That may sound a little harsh, but it’s the logical application of the motto by which I lived during my pursuit of the fourteen 8,000ers: Reaching the summit is optional. Getting down is mandatory.
What really impresses me about Fritz Wiessner is that, believing that the achievement of a lifetime was well within his grasp, tempted to un-rope and go for the summit alone, he listened to the terrified plea of his partner and instead turned back. After K2, Pasang Lama would go on to become one of the greatest Sherpa of his generation. He went on many more Himalayan expeditions, and in 1954 he reached the summit with an Austrian party on the first ascent of Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth-highest mountain.
According to Galen Rowell,
In the middle sixties, an American climber visiting Nepal met Pasang and asked him about the 1939 expedition. His eyes lit up as he talked about his friend “Fritz sahib,” who had saved his life by not forcing him to continue to the summit…. “Give Fritz sahib my good wishes,” said Pasang as the American left.
There is no getting around the fact that Wiessner agonized for the rest of his life about the decision he made at 27,500 feet on July 19, 1939. As he put it in 1984, at age eighty-four:
If I were in wonderful condition like I was then, if the place where my man stood was safe, if the weather was good, if I had a night coming on like that one, with the moon and the calm air, if I could see what was ahead as I did then … then I would probably unrope and go on alone. But I can get pretty weak, if I feel that my man will suffer. He was so afraid, and I liked the fellow. He was a comrade to me, and he had done so