K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [94]
Some of these critics seemed to operate from a double standard. They’d imply that I wasn’t a complete climber if I hadn’t done El Cap or led a 5.13 rock climb. Yet they themselves had never set foot on an 8,000-meter peak, let alone climbed one without supplemental oxygen. I’ve endured risks and hardships on 8,000ers that some other climbers could never imagine.
In the past, one climber would applaud another simply for succeeding, whether it meant putting up a new route or lending his face to an ad for an energy bar. We all pulled for one another to “make it.” A lot of the more recent sniping and criticism seems to be based on ignorance, jealousy, or just having too much free time with nothing else to do or talk about.
Mountaineering is too wonderful an endeavor, and too personal a one, you’d think, to be sullied by petty jealousies and one-upsmanship. And yet, from its very earliest years, climbing has been afflicted with intense competitiveness, and has generated the kind of controversy and even mudslinging that, for instance, Wiessner endured after the 1939 K2 expedition.
To mountaineers of the generations before mine, making the first ascent of a mountain was the ultimate accomplishment. The first ascent of Everest, in 1953, is still far and away the most celebrated deed in climbing history. And in my own generation, there were guys (and gals) who focused their passions on finding beautiful unclimbed mountains around the world and figuring out how to get to the top of them. As the 1980s slid into the ‘90s and then into the twenty-first century, though, these pioneers had to head off to more and more remote ranges—the Tien Shan of western China, for example, or the high valleys of Kyrgyzstan, or the glacial massifs of Baffin Island—to find worthy unclimbed prizes.
That was never my game. In fact, I confess that I’ve never made a first ascent of a peak anywhere in the world. On the whole, I don’t feel that I’ve missed an essential part of the mountaineering experience by not having done so. I’ve always thought that even if I’m on a peak that has been climbed before, I’m making my own personal “first ascent.” That’s the intrigue of adventure—doing something you’ve never done before.
Yet when I think back to 1953, and imagine Houston and Bates and their teammates setting off for K2, full of confidence that at last they would be the men to make the first ascent of one of the greatest and hardest mountains in the world, a little bit of that teenage envy creeps back. Wouldn’t that have been a glorious summer to hike up the Baltoro Glacier? Maybe after all I was born too late….
From 1939 to 1945, mountaineering pretty much shut down worldwide. There was mountain warfare waged in the Alps—the famous Tenth Mountain Division was hatched as part of the World War II effort, enlisting many of the best American climbers—but scrambling up a steep slope to attack an enemy entrenched on a rocky crest is not the same thing as climbing a great peak “because it is there.”
The few exceptions during the war years include some extraordinary adventures. One of the classics of our literature is Felice Benuzzi’s No Picnic on Mount Kenya, which I read early on in my own climbing career. It’s the true story of three Italian prisoners of war interred in a British camp in Kenya. From the grounds, every day they could see Mount Kenya—a 17,058-foot peak that’s a serious climb, unlike the more famous Kilimanjaro—towering above them. In January 1943, they escaped from the camp just so they could climb the mountain. They spent eighteen days working their way up its cliffs and couloirs, but were defeated short of the summit. Rather than continue their escape deeper into the African wilderness, the three men hiked back to the British camp and turned themselves in. For their troubles, each of them spent twenty-eight days in solitary confinement.
Even after the war, mountaineering was slow to return to the Himalaya. And the painful separation