K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [96]
I submitted an application, feeling full well there was really little chance I’d be accepted, in view of the great number of other applicants, most younger and “in-their-prime.” … Also, because Houston and Bates wanted to personally meet all applicants before confirming any choices—and I couldn’t afford a trip East just to be interviewed and meet them…. But Bob Craig wrote them and supported my application. And while Craig and I were [later] working at Camp Drum, NY, I had a weekend visit with Charlie and Bates in Exeter, NH, where we hit it off right from the start.
Out of the Exeter screening process a legend was born, to the effect that it was Houston’s dog, a golden retriever named Honey, that made the final choices. In 2007, Houston admitted to his biographer Bernadette McDonald, “It’s true that our dog didn’t like the people we didn’t like. But that’s as far as it went.” Houston’s wife, Dorcas, also made sharp appraisals of the visiting candidates. “She had a very good feel for quality people,” Houston told McDonald.
Dee did indeed end up being chosen for the team without a tryout in Exeter, on the strong recommendation of his old buddy and fellow Rainier guide Bob Craig, who had already been accepted. By 1952, Craig was a twenty-eight-year-old ski instructor living in Aspen whose 1946 climbs of Devils Thumb and Kates Needle on the Alaska-Canada border already stood as two of the finest alpine first ascents ever performed by an American. George Bell, twenty-seven years old, was a physics professor at Cornell who had been on major expeditions to the Andes. Twenty-six-year-old Art Gilkey, from Iowa, was a geologist who had done hard routes in the Tetons and glacial research in Alaska. Pete Schoening, a chemical engineer, also twenty-six years old, was probably the strongest climber chosen for the team. In addition to numerous first ascents and new routes in the Cascades, he had been a member of the 1952 party that made the first ascent of King Peak in the Yukon, one of the highest mountains in the remote and massively glaciated Saint Elias Range.
Houston and Bates meant what they’d said about valuing the ability to get along above technical skill and ambition. One of the candidates for K2 who was rejected was Fred Beckey. Thirty years old in 1953, Beckey had a more stellar record of first ascents all over the United States and Canada than any other American climber his age. As a nineteen-year-old in 1942, with his seventeen-year-old brother as his only partner, Beckey had made an astounding second ascent of Mount Waddington, six years after Fritz Wiessner and Bill House had made the first ascent. In 1946, Beckey had been the driving force on Devils Thumb and Kates Needle. On his first attempt on the soaring granite spire of the Thumb, Beckey had paired up with Fritz Wiessner, the only time the two men who were probably the country’s finest mountaineers of their day shared a rope. But on the approach hike, as he thrashed his way through a fiendish tangle of devil’s club, Wiessner twisted and badly injured his knee. He pushed on to the base of the mountain but had to give up the attempt—one of the sorest disappointments of his climbing life. Beckey returned a few weeks later with Bob Craig and a third partner and bagged the first ascent.
No matter how strong he was as a climber, however, Beckey had a reputation as a headstrong, eccentric man with a quick temper. Houston never went on record as to why he turned down Beckey’s application, but on the Abruzzi Ridge one day that summer, Pete Schoening would declare that he wished Beckey had been chosen for the team.
Still alive and still climbing at age eighty-six, Beckey today has by far the longest and most distinguished record of first ascents of previously unclimbed peaks of any American ever. And his reputation as a difficult eccentric still clings to him like glue. I don’t know Beckey, but I’ve always admired his climbs.
Rounding out the party was Tony Streather, a twenty-seven-year-old British transport officer who had spent many years in Pakistan and