K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [95]
Charlie Houston had never gotten K2 out of his blood. For years after the war, he tried to wangle a permit from the government of Pakistan. One huge obstacle was that the battle between India and Pakistan for control of Kashmir rendered the old approach route from Srinagar out of the question for foreigners. Ironically, however, the same struggle turned the sleepy village of Skardu into a military outpost, complete with a modern airstrip. The first postwar expedition to K2 would not have to hike 360 miles to reach base camp but could fly in to Skardu—as virtually all expeditions have done ever since.
Houston was convinced that if Wiessner, at the head of a very weak team, had been able to get within 750 vertical feet of the summit, with only easy terrain above, a stronger team with far better equipment would almost surely succeed on the Abruzzi Ridge. But a permit for K2 seemed so remote a possibility that Houston applied instead to Nepal for permission to attempt Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain. (It would first be climbed by a French team led by the great Lionel Terray in 1955.) Yet even as he was preparing for Makalu, Houston finally succeeded, with the aid of the American ambassador to Pakistan, in winning a permit for K2 for the summer of 1953.
In choosing a team for the 1938 expedition, Houston had relied on recommendations from Harvard friends and from colleagues who were higher-ups in the AAC. For the 1953 expedition, he was determined to put together not only the strongest team possible but a group of men who would get along well together. That was a stroke of genius. A team made up of members who like and trust one another will always be more successful than a team built solely on the skills of the climbers. So in 1953 the selection process ended up being more far-ranging and democratic but also more exhaustive than that of any American mountaineering expedition to that date.
There was no question that Bob Bates would be on board. Through the war years, Bates and Houston had stayed the closest of friends, and Bates was as keen for another crack at K2 as was his former Harvard chum. By the summer of 1953, though, Bates was forty-two years old; Houston was thirty-nine. That’s not really old in Himalayan climbing terms, and both men were in excellent shape. But to round out the team, Houston and Bates sought younger men.
The AAC put out a nationwide notice soliciting applications for the five remaining slots on the K2 expedition. In the end, Houston and Bates weighed the credentials of more than twenty-five candidates. By 1952, Houston had set up a medical practice in Exeter, New Hampshire. As a rather draconian requirement for consideration for K2, he demanded that every would-be teammate travel (at his own expense) to Exeter to interview in person with the leader.
One of the men who was ultimately accepted was Dee Molenaar, a thirty-four-year-old climber with a solid record of first ascents in the Northwest and the Sierra Nevada who’d also been on the second ascent in 1946 of 18,008-foot Mount Saint Elias, the third-highest peak in Alaska or Canada. (The first ascent, of course, was led by the Duke of the Abruzzi way back in 1897.) In the fall of 1952, Molenaar left his job as climbing ranger on Mount Rainier to accept a new post in Colorado Springs as an adviser to the army’s Mountain and Cold Weather Training Command. A modest fellow, Molenaar was surprised when friends urged him to apply for K2.
Dee and I have become really good friends. No one was more supportive of my efforts during Endeavor 8000 than he was. A couple of months after I’d climbed K2, Dee gave me a typed copy of his own K2 diary from 1953, with a really warm inscription to “another Rainier guide who’s gone on to higher challenges and with great success.”
At the beginning of his typed diary, in an introduction called “K2 Prelude,” Dee recalls the tryout