The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (10 page)

As the men looked toward their assault on K2, they knew they had untold amounts of hard work ahead of them and a limited window in which to get it done. Learning from what the early explorers had discovered of the region, Charlie Houston and now Wiessner knew they had only four months in which to reach the mountain, climb to the summit, descend back to base camp, and trek back out to civilization, before catastrophic amounts of snowfall and frigid temperatures would stop the team in its tracks. Teams must wait for the worst of the snow to melt before they can get close to the mountain and, once there, they have only two months before winter returns in mid-to late August.

In preparation for the unrelenting labor ahead, Fritz had arranged for the men to spend a week acclimatizing and skiing at the Ski Club of India’s Khillanmarg hut overlooking the vale. It sat a day’s hike above the mountain village of Gulmarg, a favorite resort for Western diplomats and military brass who often left their wives (and girlfriends) unattended while they returned to their offices in Bombay and Karachi. Curiously, he also invited two young British women, Rosi Briscoe and Fiona Williams, to join the team at the hut. While George Sheldon noted that they were “not too interesting and they have a sense of humor like a lemon,” Dudley wrote to Alice that he feared “two girls amongst six men is bound to cause demoralization” and distract them physically and psychologically from their preparations for the physical rigors ahead. The only member on the team to have seen the horrors and demands of warfare up close, Dudley was all too aware that the battle they faced ahead of them in the mountains could be just as life-threatening. While he didn’t question Fritz about his decision to invite the young women, Dudley was concerned about the man’s judgment.

The team’s training took on a competitive edge once the men hit the slopes. After climbing on their skis from the hut at 10,000 feet to the summits 3,000 and 4,000 feet above them, they raced each other down, each boasting of his exploits and deriding the others’ achievements. Jack noted each time Chap fell; Sheldon took particular delight in detailing Fritz’s missteps; and both men remarked that Dudley usually steamed ahead of the group and then raced down like “a rocket,” zooming past them all. While Jack was an accomplished skier and expected to do well, Dudley surprised them not only with his strength and speed on the rough and challenging slopes but also with his seeming indifference to the thinner air at 14,000 feet.

Dudley was pleased that the long, hot, dusty journey to the foothills of the Himalayas was over and that he felt better and in finer shape than he had expected he would. The skiing was some of the best he’d ever had, although the younger men were often careless; if not for some fast maneuvering on his part, he and Chap would have collided as the boy skied out of control down the steep slope straight toward him. Sounding rather avuncular, he scolded Chap after the near-collision. Chap tipped his hat in apology as he continued down to the hut. Again, as Dudley watched in concern, Chap gathered too much speed on his already tired legs in the deep snow, fell, somersaulted four or five times down a hundred feet, and finally came to rest, miraculously in one piece. He then climbed back up for his poles, shook himself off, and skied slowly down to the hut, carefully turning the skis with legs that now shook with fatigue.

Each day ended with an enormous dinner, a parlor game called Up Jenkins, which involved two teams passing a hidden coin beneath the table, and a round or two of chess, although the men were learning that Fritz was not only a terrible chess player, he was a worse loser and took most of the fun out of it for them. Often, as if they couldn’t quite help themselves, the Dartmouth boys would have a water fight, exhausting themselves in the thin air and soaking their already damp clothes. Some nights, Jack, Fritz, Chap, and the two English girls would argue politics and religion while Dudley, Tony, and George read books and wrote letters home.

The days began with the servants softly murmuring “Chai ready, sahib,” as they handed each man his tea in bed. After a relaxed breakfast, the men would put a coat of wax on their long wooden skis, adjust their leather and steel bindings, gather their gear, and climb a different mountain, gazing in amazement at the scenery around them as they ascended. As they reached the summit, the landscape on the other side would reveal itself: seas of white foothills capped by towering rocky, snow-covered peaks, mountain lakes, and, in the distance to the northwest, their first glimpse of an 8,000-meter peak, Nanga Parbat. The men stared in silent wonder at its sheer size, 26,660 feet rising almost ominously out of the earth, its complex ridge lines, ice cliffs, hanging glaciers, and rock walls reaching toward the sky. They had never seen anything like it and they weren’t sure it was an altogether pleasant sight.
If this is what Nanga Parbat looks like,
many thought,
what the hell are we in for with K2 and another 2,000 feet on top of that?

The men climbed and skied hard and conditioned their bodies well, often taking their pulse as they reached the peaks above Khillanmarg. Except for Jack, who suffered insomnia, one of the classic signs of altitude sickness, none seemed unduly bothered by the climbing with heavy skis or demanding skiing at that altitude. As part of their conditioning, George and Jack bet five dollars that they would both keep their cigarette consumption down to three Lucky Strikes a day until their return to Srinagar in August. (What’s remarkable is that they could smoke at all in air which felt increasingly claustrophobic the higher the men got.)

On one of their last mornings at the Khillanmarg hut, Sheldon, whose pen was often as sharp as his wit, was in rare form:

Although it had been an invaluable week of conditioning, Dudley couldn’t help but notice that the men just weren’t coming together as a team. Fritz was a detached ruler, issuing directives and criticisms which the rest of the men largely ignored, often with snickering derision. Jack and George seemed incapable of a day without pranks. Chap was a nice boy, but he was almost impossible to get to know and he went through the day nearly mute in his silent observations of the world. And Tony somehow seemed out of place, having already told Fritz he didn’t intend to climb far out of base camp. Why then, Dudley wondered, was he here? As Dudley packed his ski clothes and parka, he hoped his worry was just nerves and that everything would move into place as soon as the men started on their trek.

On April 27, the team left the ski hut and returned to Major Hadow’s for a final week of equipment staging, team organization, and the obligatory goodbye parties. Unlike British explorers Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman, who favored small, lightweight expeditions where every man carried his own gear plus a share of the team’s essential equipment, the 1939 American K2 expedition had four tons of equipment, necessitating first a fleet of ponies and then scores of porters from the Hunza region of Baltistan. For the first two weeks of the march, porters carrying 50 to 55 pounds and ponies carrying 150 pounds would be able to haul the bulk of the team’s gear, but once they left the flood plains of the Indus, Shigar, and Braldu rivers and headed into the mountains, they would rely entirely on manpower to carry their loads.

These porters, or “coolies,” as they were called by the “sahibs” before the civil rights movement of the 1960s dictated a less racist distinction, have been hired since the days of Alexander the Great to do the white man’s heavy lifting on his explorations. Even though they are indispensable in carrying the team’s tonnage, these local men and boys are still largely seen as uneducated and often untrustworthy servants. In 1939 the team’s month-long trek into the mountain would require a series of porters, each traveling between two and three days from their village, paid pennies a day for their effort, and sent home as another group was hired for the next leg.

Fritz looked over his first group vying for the job. Some were older than his father and many seemed young enough to be his grandson. Fritz walked among the applicants like a horse trader, checking their feet and teeth—if either went bad on the trek, it could mean an expensive and irrevocable delay. While many were barefoot, some had yak-skin boots, others had sandals made from old tires. All of them were filthy in patched pants and long blouse-like shirts, and they draped themselves in tattered blankets against the cold and wore various forms of headgear—hats, shawls, woolen caps, and cut-up blankets—even though the temperature would be close to 130 by midday. Fritz chose his first group of men and then the village elder, like a circus ringleader with a whip, corralled and separated them into “hired” or “not hired” groups, and they dispersed through the dust.

With the porters chosen, the team members laid out their equipment, food, and personal items in a sea of gear on Hadow’s lawn in order to pack it into 55-pound loads. As it was slowly unpacked, catalogued, and organized, Dudley discovered a glaring omission: the two-way radios he had instructed Fritz to buy. He had learned first-hand on the open ocean the value of the communication they afforded, but Fritz, hating all things mechanical and desperate to save money and weight wherever he could, had cancelled the order and put the money toward other expenses. Dudley stood looking at Fritz waiting for an explanation, but Fritz waved off his concern with his usual flick of the wrist and told him that they would be using smoke signals instead. Dudley didn’t know what to say; the very notion of using smoke signals high on a mountain with gale-force winds was insane. It was, Dudley realized, as foolish as thinking you could use them on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Besides, what in hell were they going to burn? They would be nearly sixty miles from the last tree once they climbed onto the glacier above Askole. Dudley looked to the other men for backup, but he realized that none had ever been in a circumstance where communication could mean the difference between life and death. These boys had never experienced weeks in uncontrolled wilderness. Summers guiding in the Tetons and weekend trips to the Adirondacks do not prepare a man for months at the edge of the world. Fritz had been to the edge of that perilous world on Nanga Parbat, and Dudley couldn’t help but wonder, once again, why his decisions seemed often to be based not on sound reasoning but on snap judgment. But it was too late. The radios were back in Europe and the team was thousands of miles into its journey. Dudley walked away from the conversation, but his unease was growing.

Fritz had made the decision early on that his team would attempt the summit without the benefit of supplemental oxygen. Not only was it prohibitively expensive, it was notoriously unreliable; many an expedition had found a number of their tanks empty once they got to the mountain. Stored in heavy, cumbersome steel canisters, bottled oxygen had been used by the British as they struggled to conquer Everest in large, assault-style expeditions, but, mainly because of cost, the underfunded, streamlined American expeditions to the Himalayas had largely gone without. Charlie Houston, leader of the 1938 and 1953 American expeditions to K2, said its weight and cost were the reasons he didn’t bring it along on either of his teams. But he also said he didn’t consider it “good sportsmanship to use gas,” comparing its use to cheating. Besides, having helped organize the first ascent of Nanda Devi, a peak in northern India just shy of the fabled 8,000-meter mark, in 1936, Houston was “quite confident we didn’t need it” to reach the summit of K2. However, Houston, a young medical student who would dedicate himself to high-altitude physiology, had brought two canisters of oxygen for medicinal purposes; if a teammate were to get sick at base camp or low on the mountain where the supplemental oxygen was available, he knew it could mean the man’s survival.
^*

Good sportsmanship or not, when used higher on the mountain bottled oxygen exponentially increases a climber’s chance of survival by providing the body and brain with rich, condensed oxygen it can’t otherwise get at high altitude. Until 2008, when a series of freak avalanches high on K2 killed eleven people, none of the deaths on descent of the mountain had happened to a climber using oxygen; it provides that much life-giving sustenance. When climbers finally don an oxygen mask as they enter the so-called Death Zone above 26,000 feet, they feel a rush of warmth from their nose to their toes as well as a sudden mental clarity, as if the world were coming into sharp focus. But in 1939 no one really knew what would happen at the heights they expected to reach, so bottled oxygen was another advantage Fritz’s team would do without as they approached K2.

The list of team gear included pack frames, goosedown sleeping bags with an inner liner of eiderdown, rubber air mattresses, crampons, pitons, carabiners, snow goggles, ice axes, large Logan canvas tents and smaller, two-man Yak tents, Primus stoves and gasoline, aluminum water bottles, canvas duffels, kitchen paraphernalia, climbing ropes, willow wands to mark the route, gasoline lanterns, sewing kits, and “one wash basin.” In his personal gear, each man had a pair of skis, at least two sweaters, two pairs of heavy, wool long underwear, two or three turtleneck sweaters, six pairs of wool socks, four pairs of wool mittens, wool hat and balaclava, double-layer windproof parka and trousers (heavy khaki), buckskin and canvas gauntlets, rubber-soled shoes for the long walk in, leather boots with tricouni nails for the mountain, a pair of sneakers, a rain cape, and any assortment of miscellaneous items of each man’s choosing. Dudley’s list of “extras” which he brought on the trip reflected much about the man: gold monogrammed cufflinks and collar pins, three pairs of mountain boots and three pairs of dress oxfords, golf shoes and bedroom slippers, a herringbone tweed jacket and a Tyrolean sports coat, a tuxedo and a double-breasted Loewy suit custom-made in Vienna, a pair of knickerbockers and a pair of grey flannel dress slacks, a Fair Isle sweater and a linen coat, two mufflers and four pairs of leather dress gloves, twenty silk ties and a Brooks Brothers bathrobe, two dozen handkerchiefs and eighteen shirts, and finally, thirty-five pairs of silk, wool, dress, and casual socks. Needless to say, he was ready for any contingency, from the opera to base camp.