K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [97]
In Rawalpindi on June 2, the team got electrifying news over the radio: Everest had been climbed by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Many decades later, Houston would tell Bernadette McDonald, “It was thrilling news, but, I must confess, I had a secret unworthy thought that this would upstage any triumph we might have in a few more months.” That day, however, Molenaar wrote in his diary, “Good news to mountaineers…. Now K2 is the highest unclimbed mountain. We’re determined to carry on our plans as before, and without bottled oxygen, which the Everesters had used.”
On June 3, the party landed in a DC-3 at the Skardu airport. In the hour-and-a-half flight from Rawalpindi, the team had solved an approach that had taken the 1938 team two weeks and 220 miles on foot. At the airport, the climbers were greeted by cheering Pakistanis carrying banners, one of which read, “We appeal our American friends to solve Kashmir Problem.”
In Skardu, the team recruited Balti porters for the hike in to base camp. They also hired ten Hunzas, men from mountain valleys near Gilgit, upstream from Skardu on the Indus River, to perform as high-altitude porters. Six of the best Hunzas were to play the role undertaken by the Sherpa in 1938 and 1939. In 1953, Sherpa were unavailable for K2, because Pakistan would not permit them to enter the country, thanks to the simmering antagonism with India. Because the Hunzas were so much less experienced than the men from Nepal, Houston and Bates decided that no high-altitude porter would go above Camp III, at 20,700 feet. On the hike in to Askole, Molenaar and Craig took time out to run “a climbing school for 8 Hunzas on a nearby boulder.”
It took the team seven days, unhindered by porter strikes, to reach Askole. Before the expedition, the seven Americans had known each other other only in pairs—Houston and Bates had climbed together, as had Craig and Molenaar, but in no other pairing had two men shared a rope, and most of them were strangers. But as Craig later wrote in the official expedition account,
As we approached our mountain, the magic cement that binds men together, the qualities which make unbreakable friendships began to form. Unconsciously, and imperceptibly, we were forming a team. If we had not it is probable that most of us would not have survived the troubles that we were to face.
How sad it is to reflect that that “magic cement” had been so sorely absent in 1939. On the hike in fourteen years earlier, the tension between Durrance and Wiessner had already begun to mount, and the faintheartedness of Sheldon, Cranmer, and Cromwell was already seeping to the surface.
From Askole, it took the team another nine days to reach base camp. At Urdukas, where the climbers thought they could discern the tent platforms hewn out of the turf by the Duke of the Abruzzi’s party in 1909, they luxuriated in what Craig would describe as “the last grass we would see for two months.” The team’s progress, however, was slowed by threats of porter strikes, which Streather solved only by inspired diplomacy. There was also enough petty stealing—boots and ice axes were the objects most coveted by the pilferers—that the Americans began to assign watches over their camps at night.
All his life, Dee Molenaar has been a gifted artist and cartographer. On the hike in to K2, he brought along a watercolor kit, and while his teammates lolled on their air mattresses, he painted the surrounding landscape. (Dee’s drawings and maps have been adapted for this book—see pages viii—ix, 217 and the endpapers.) He also paid attention to the character