K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [91]
ABOVE: Chris Klinke’s remarkable photo of the thirty-odd climbers going for the summit on August 1, 2008, shot just after the first fatality occurred. © Chris Klinke
Detail from same Klinke photo, showing the “traffic jam” on the ramp above the Bottleneck couloir.
© Chris Kinke
K2 from near Broad Peak base camp. © Ed Viesturs Collection
K2 from high on Broad Peak. © Ed Viesturs Collection
Climbers ascending fixed ropes on the Abruzzi Ridge. © Charley Mace
ABOVE: Ed Viesturs (left) and Scott Fischer sharing a tent. © Ed Viesturs Collection
Camp IV at 26,000 feet.
© Ed Viesturs Collection
ABOVE: Ed Viesturs reaches the summit on August 16, 1992. © Charley Mace
Viesturs (left) and Fischer embrace on the summit. © Charley Mace
Left to right: Viesturs, Fischer, and Mace after climbing K2. © Ed Viesturs Collection
Paula and Ed, 2007. © Rick Burns
BELOW: Gil, Anabel, and Ella, 2008. © Rick Burns
5
BROTHERHOOD
They say that every adventurer suffers from the conviction that he was born too late. When, as a teenager, I read the classic books of polar exploration—like Robert Falcon Scott’s diary of his fatal trip to the south pole or the various books about Ernest Shackleton’s heroic expedition when his ship, the Endurance, was trapped in the ice off Antarctica and sank—I was taken aback by a recurrent theme: those guys were sure they’d been born too late. By 1900, there was no western frontier left to explore, uninhabited by anybody except Indians; no island in the South Pacific waiting to be discovered by a Captain Cook; no source of the Nile still lost in the blank spaces on the map of Africa. Scott and Shackle-ton and their rivals wondered at times whether trying to reach the poles was too arbitrary a goal. After all, the south pole was simply a spot on an empty, windswept glacial plateau, defined not by a wilderness that could be tamed and settled but by a unique latitude: ninety degrees south. Nobody who ever read Scott’s diary can forget his entry on finally arriving there: “Great God! this is an awful place.”
But, man! When I read their books, I kept thinking how lucky they were to be exploring in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when nearly all of the Arctic and the Antarctic was still unknown. I was sure that it was I who had been born too late, not Scott or Shackleton. Even the 1950s, when climbers were making the first ascents of the 8,000-meter peaks, loomed for me like a lost heyday. Exploration then seemed simpler, yet more dangerous. Off you went into some little-known region on the map, or toward the top of some unclimbed peak, without being able to send a word back home. You returned home months or even years later. Now we have sat phones, up-to-the-minute weather forecasts, and online dispatches from the field. It seems that we’re as much burdened by technology as we are helped by it, and it becomes a crutch to make up for missing skills—just as, for example, the GPS has replaced the compass.
When, as a teenager, I read Charlie Houston and Bob Bates’s K2: The Savage Mountain, I thought how fortunate those guys were that as late as 1953, the second-highest mountain in the world was still unclimbed. In my mind, there was nothing arbitrary about that kind of goal. Traveling by dogsled, you can’t see the north pole from a distance—you have to be almost on top of it before you know what it looks like. Even then, you don’t actually “see” the pole. You need to make sextant sightings and triangulate your position before you can honestly say that you are standing on or at least reasonably close to the pole.
But I’d “seen” K2 ever since I’d first opened a book and looked at the famous picture of it from the 1909 expedition: K2 from Windy Gap, looking impossibly big and beautiful, a photo often attributed to Vittorio Sella but actually taken by the Duke of the Abruzzi (see photo insert, between pages 150 and 151). Even as a teenager, I understood that to try to get to the highest windblown point in that glass-plate picture would take all the suffering in the