K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [99]
Sorry, Charlie, but that idea sounds a bit odd. Perhaps, though, it derived from how little the team knew about the mountain above 26,000 feet. Evidently, in 1953 the climbers planned not only to follow the arduous 1,500-foot climb up high-angled rock and mixed ground by which Wiessner had made his first attack, but to find a two-man campsite near the top of it! They knew how difficult Wiessner had found those rock bands, and what a good technical climber he was. Why not opt for the Bottleneck and the traverse under the hanging ice cliff? After all, Wiessner had said that if he had had crampons, he could have “practically run” up that couloir on his second attempt.
In the 1950s, the thinking in the Himalaya and the Karakoram was still bound by a dictum from the 1920s and ‘30s that insisted that camps on 8,000ers had to be placed close together. Just a month before Houston’s team started working its way up the Abruzzi Ridge, Hillary and Tenzing had set out for the summit of Everest from a Camp IX at 27,900 feet. Nobody camps there nowadays; instead, it’s standard practice to go for the top from the South Col, even though, at 26,000 feet, it’s a full 3,000 feet below the summit. Twenty-first-century expeditions place only four camps on Everest, compared to the nine that were used in the 1950s. This certainly makes for longer and harder days, but it drastically reduces the amount of gear that has to be carried high on the mountain just to supply the camps.
Likewise, on K2, Wiessner’s party had established nine camps. In 1992, we used only four. Nowadays on K2, nobody camps higher than the Shoulder, which is 2,200 feet below the summit.
The difference between then and now is partly logistical—gear is much lighter today, so loads aren’t so heavy. But it’s mainly psychological. It took a mental breakthrough to realize that a party could climb Everest or K2 with only four camps above base. It’s actually easier in many respects, and safer (fewer camps in precarious places). In 1939, with their amazing push from base camp to Camp VI—6,900 feet gained in one day—Pasang Kikuli and Tsering had proved that such long nonstop hauls were possible for climbers in good shape, even without bottled oxygen. But it would take a while for an economy of campsites to become standard operating procedure.
June 21 was Molenaar’s thirty-fifth birthday. It was not a happy occasion. He was ill and weak and “wobbly on legs,” as he wrote in his diary. He wondered if he had contracted dengue fever, the malady that had probably been the cause of Petzoldt’s recurrent high fever in 1938. Dee added, “Very homesick this evening, wondering how Lee and Patti [his wife and daughter] are, halfway around the world. Charlie also admits much of the same feeling lately; we’re the only ones with wives and kids.” During the expedition, Dee would often take out his wallet to look at the photos of Lee and Patti he kept there.
On June 27, Bates and Houston set out from Camp I, at the base of the Abruzzi, to find the route to Camp II they had pioneered fifteen years earlier. What must at the time have been a mortifying experience, Houston later treated in print as a comedy of errors:
For the first two hours we climbed steep scree (loose stone) and snow slopes, crossing a few little ribs, exclaiming “I remember this chimney” or “Do you see that cairn? I’m sure we must be on the old route.” …
By noon we had to confess that we were lost.
It would take a second effort the next day, and much arguing, to work out the route to the little saddle that Petzoldt had first discovered in 1938, the site of Camp II at 19,300 feet.
In Bates and Houston’s defense, I have to say that on the lower slopes of the Abruzzi Ridge, the