K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [98]
Charlie: fine leader, excellent humor and patience, optimistic in most cases.
Bates: hard worker, cheerful, fine humor, fine organizer, fast walker.
Dee has never been the type to criticize his teammates, even in the privacy of his diary. What faint hints of criticism he allowed himself were tactfully phrased. Of Pete Schoening, for instance, he wrote, “quiet… extremely cooperative & hardworking around camp, worries about porters somewhat … may tend to make others uneasy due to constant demand for ‘something to do.’”
On June 20, the team reached base camp and paid off their 180 porters. They would return on August 10. In terms of the calendar, the 1953 team was thus three weeks behind Wiessner’s 1939 entourage, which had reached base camp on May 31. But in allowing fifty-one days before the return of the porters, Houston’s team carved out an almost identical span in which to climb K2 or fail in their attempt. (That fifty-three days had not been long enough in 1939 did not seem to give Houston pause.)
One reason for the 1953 team’s optimism sprang from the radical improvement mountaineering gear had undergone during the previous decade and a half. Now the climbers had nylon ropes, stretchy and five times stronger than the hemp or manila ropes used in the 1930s. They had rubber-cleated Vibram soles on their boots, instead of the hobnailed leather footgear of the past. Up high, the men sometimes wore rubber boots developed for soldiers in the Korean War. These glorified galoshes provided great insulation, and for a while they became popular on expeditions to really cold mountains. (Climbers started calling them “Mickey Mouse boots” because they looked like the black, oversized feet of the Disney character.) They’re pretty clumsy, though, for purchase on rock, and when you strap crampons to them, they tend to twist off.
The Seattle firm of Eddie Bauer had custom-made matching red down jackets for the team, many times warmer and lighter than the layers of sweaters the climbers had donned in 1938. (Another link for me to the 1953 team is that within the last two years, Eddie Bauer has become my principal equipment sponsor. That’s sort of fitting, since my first sleeping bag was a green Eddie Bauer model I used on Boy Scout outings.)
The 1953 team also had state-of-the-art down sleeping bags made in Switzerland, each one a nesting pair, a smaller inner tucked inside the larger outer. They were “always warm,” the men later testified, and their only drawback was that, weighing seven pounds, they were hard to compress and cram inside a pack. Those packs were of a new steel-and-nylon frame design, far superior to the shapeless rucksacks of the 1930s. And this time around, Houston had no objection to bringing scores of pitons, both rock pins and special ice pitons made for the team by a friend of Houston and Bates’s at MIT. (Apparently Houston’s old disdain for “ironmongery” had softened over the years.)
Probably the most important gear the 1953 team had that the 1938 team had not was several lightweight walkie-talkie radios. Throughout the expedition, the climbers could usually communicate with base camp, and often from one camp to another. (If Wiessner’s party had had such radios, it is possible that the whole tragedy could have been averted. Of course the technology of 1939 had not yet produced lightweight walkie-talkies.) The 1953 team also had a Zenith portable radio at base camp, on which they received the occasional broadcast from as far away as Europe and even, several times, the United States.
The party planned to use, for the most part, the same campsites they had first established in 1938, although they were leery of Camp III, where the rocks kicked loose from above had torn holes through the tents and nearly hit three of the men. There’s one detail in Houston’s account of camp logistics that I passed right over when I