K2 (27 page)

What really impresses me about Fritz Wiessner is that, believing that the achievement of a lifetime was well within his grasp, tempted to un-rope and go for the summit alone, he listened to the terrified plea of his partner and instead turned back. After K2, Pasang Lama would go on to become one of the greatest Sherpa of his generation. He went on many more Himalayan expeditions, and in 1954 he reached the summit with an Austrian party on the first ascent of Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth-highest mountain.

According to Galen Rowell,

There is no getting around the fact that Wiessner agonized for the rest of his life about the decision he made at 27,500 feet on July 19, 1939. As he put it in 1984, at age eighty-four:

BROTHERHOOD

They say that every adventurer suffers from the conviction that he was born too late. When, as a teenager, I read the classic books of polar exploration—like Robert Falcon Scott’s diary of his fatal trip to the south pole or the various books about Ernest Shackleton’s heroic expedition when his ship, the
Endurance
, was trapped in the ice off Antarctica and sank—I was taken aback by a recurrent theme: those guys were sure they’d been born too late. By 1900, there was no western frontier left to explore, uninhabited by anybody except Indians; no island in the South Pacific waiting to be discovered by a Captain Cook; no source of the Nile still lost in the blank spaces on the map of Africa. Scott and Shackle-ton and their rivals wondered at times whether trying to reach the poles was too arbitrary a goal. After all, the south pole was simply a spot on an empty, windswept glacial plateau, defined not by
a wilderness that could be tamed and settled but by a unique latitude: ninety degrees south. Nobody who ever read Scott’s diary can forget his entry on finally arriving there: “Great God! this is an awful place.”

But, man! When I read their books, I kept thinking how lucky they were to be exploring in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when nearly all of the Arctic and the Antarctic was still unknown. I was sure that it was I who had been born too late, not Scott or Shackleton. Even the 1950s, when climbers were making the first ascents of the 8,000-meter peaks, loomed for me like a lost heyday. Exploration then seemed simpler, yet more dangerous. Off you went into some little-known region on the map, or toward the top of some unclimbed peak, without being able to send a word back home. You returned home months or even years later. Now we have sat phones, up-to-the-minute weather forecasts, and online dispatches from the field. It seems that we’re as much burdened by technology as we are helped by it, and it becomes a crutch to make up for missing skills—just as, for example, the GPS has replaced the compass.

When, as a teenager, I read Charlie Houston and Bob Bates’s
K2: The Savage Mountain
, I thought how fortunate those guys were that as late as 1953, the second-highest mountain in the world was still unclimbed. In my mind, there was nothing arbitrary about that kind of goal. Traveling by dogsled, you can’t see the north pole from a distance—you have to be almost on top of it before you know what it looks like. Even then, you don’t actually “see” the pole. You need to make sextant sightings and triangulate your position before you can honestly say that you are standing on or at least reasonably close to the pole.

But I’d “seen” K2 ever since I’d first opened a book and looked at the famous picture of it from the 1909 expedition: K2 from Windy Gap, looking impossibly big and beautiful, a photo often attributed to Vittorio Sella but actually taken by the Duke of the Abruzzi (see photo insert, between pages 150 and 151). Even as a teenager, I understood that to try to get to the highest windblown point in that glass-plate picture would take all the suffering in the world.

By the time I started climbing in 1977, all fourteen of the highest mountains in the world had long since been ascended. (Shishapangma was the last to fall, to the Chinese in 1964.) All the highest mountains in Alaska and Canada had been climbed. I don’t think there was a single summit in the Cascades of Washington State—my first stomping grounds—that hadn’t been reached. It was hard not to feel that I’d been born too late.

For Whymper, or Mummery, or Mallory, or even Fritz Wiessner, “mountaineer” was an unambiguous label. Mallory was the guiding force on the first three Everest expeditions, but he was also the best rock climber of his day in Great Britain. Wiessner had been one of the best rock climbers in the world as a teenager, one of the best alpinists in his twenties, and one of the best Himalayan climbers in his thirties. Climbing had yet to be subdivided into specialized disciplines.

By the 1980s, however, that subdividing was well under way, and by now it’s become extreme. Some young rope gun at Red River Gorge in Kentucky, trying to put up an 80-foot route that’s rated 5.14c in difficulty, knows almost nothing about the Himalaya. And guys who, like me, have specialized in 8,000-meter peaks know very little about Red River Gorge, or Hueco Tanks in Texas, or Mount Charleston in Nevada. We’re all still “climbers,” but our fraternities (and sororities) are so specialized that we scarcely understand one another’s jargon.

In 2009, there are serious climbers all over the world who’ve never climbed outdoors. Instead, they concentrate on artificial walls in climbing gyms, gearing up for “comps”—competitions complete with referees, stopwatches, and “isolation chambers” (so that one jock doesn’t get the benefit of watching another try the route of the day). There’s another whole gang composed of those who climb outdoors, but never use ropes. They’re into “bouldering”—doing the hardest sequences of moves possible on boulders lying in the woods. Boulderers rarely get more than 30 feet off the ground, and they’re secured by buddies spotting them and by springy crash pads laid out on the ground.

“Sport climbers” use ropes, and tackle routes ranging from one pitch
to a dozen or more on real cliffs or “crags,” but they rely for safety on expansion bolts previously drilled into the rock every six feet or so. These athletes, like boulderers, are into the pure pursuit of difficulty, and the risks they incur are almost nonexistent.

“Trad climbers”—”trad” is for “traditional”—disdain the connect-the-dots bolted routes and insist instead on placing their own protection (“pro,” in the jargon of the trade), in the form of nuts and cams wedged into cracks to shorten a potential fall. These climbers think of themselves as purists, in touch with the long legacy of their pastime, and for them risk is a real issue. If your “pro” isn’t good, a fall can result in serious injury or even death.

I served my mountaineering apprenticeship as a trad climber. First at Devils Lake in Wisconsin with my high school pal Rich King, and then on more alpine routes in the Cascades of Washington State, I learned the basics of rope work, belaying, rappelling, and placing “pro.” All these skills would help me immensely when I turned to the highest peaks in the world.

Trad climbers overlap with “big-wall climbers,” who work out long routes on massive cliffs such as El Capitan in Yosemite. Those routes can take several days, but there’s also a subgroup of people who are into doing big routes in the fastest possible time. On El Cap, every major route has its speed record, and those times are coveted prizes for the men and women who go after them.

I suppose that true mountaineering begins with “alpine climbing.” Alpine warriors set their sights on fiendishly difficult routes in ranges such as the Alps, the Canadian Rockies, and the Fitz Roy Massif of Patagonia. Here, “objective hazards”—everything from avalanches to falling rocks to storms—play a critical role. At the cutting edge, alpinism is a very dangerous sport. (It’s somewhere on this spectrum that we stop being comfortable with calling climbing a “sport.” We don’t know exactly what to call it—a “pastime,” a “pursuit,” an “adventure”? “Sport” conjures up baseball or golf. Mountaineering is a way of life.)

Alpinists are interested in beautiful “lines” on major mountains, but the height of the mountain above sea level is pretty irrelevant. Some of
the scariest and most challenging peaks in the world, like Cerro Torre in Patagonia, are only about 9,000 or 10,000 feet high. And sometimes climbers will complete a difficult new route on an alpine peak but won’t bother to go to the summit. The route itself becomes the goal.

Finally you get to my group, which we might call Himalayan or high-altitude climbers. Even within our coterie, there are subgroups. There are guys like the American Steve House, who with one partner climbed the notorious Rupal Face on Nanga Parbat alpine-style, but who’s also done very hard new routes on smaller peaks in Alaska and Canada. He’s taken the technical skills he’s honed on lower peaks and applied them to 8,000ers. I admire House immensely, but I don’t have the technical skill or the interest to attack some unclimbed face in the Great Gorge of the Ruth Glacier just south of Mount McKinley. And House has no interest, as far as I can tell, in climbing all fourteen 8,000ers.

From the start, technical climbing per se didn’t hold a great appeal for me. I didn’t ever pursue it seriously enough to know whether I could have become a top rock climber. But I loved a physical challenge, especially if it involved commitment over the long haul—not just several days but weeks or months. That’s why, I think, I gravitated to the 8,000ers, starting with my first attempt on Everest in 1987. That was a huge step, but a logical one, beyond Mount Rainier, where I’d been guiding since 1982. (Some of my fellow RMI guides also turned to 8,000-meter peaks, but they were the exception, not the norm.)

And from the start, I felt instinctively that I wanted to climb those big mountains in as pure a style as possible—without the aid of supplementary oxygen, without the support of Sherpas hauling my loads, and on expeditions that I organized myself. When I go around the country giving slide shows, a lot of people in the audience assume that what I called Endeavor 8000—my quest for all fourteen 8,000ers—was a project I had formulated from the start. Not so: I was three or four peaks into the roster before I could envision a way of completing the whole cycle. And when Annapurna started to seem my “nemesis,” as I called it, I would have been willing to walk away with only thirteen under my belt.

Of course, it was gratifying to become the first American to climb all
fourteen, and only the sixth mountaineer in the world to do so without bottled oxygen. Maybe I hadn’t been born too late after all! I can imagine some young guy in, say, 2025 reading about my era in the Himalaya and the Karakoram and saying to himself, “Damn it, imagine what it must have been like when no other American had been on top of all the 8,000ers. I guess I was born too late….”

I did gain a fair amount of attention after I completed the cycle of 8,000ers, appearing on talk shows such as
Charlie Rose
, the
Today
show,
The Colbert Report
, and
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
. And my book about the quest,
No Shortcuts to the Top
, generated an unbelievable amount of fan mail, mostly from nonclimbers. But I was first surprised, then hurt when I started to realize that in a certain small portion of the climbing world, there was a nasty backlash against my modest celebrity. I’d hear thirdhand that so-and-so had said, “Big fucking deal. So Viesturs climbed the standard route on Cho Oyu. Why doesn’t he try something new or really difficult?” Nobody ever said anything quite like that to my face. So I was sort of left sputtering my answer into the void. I was tempted to say to a critic like that, “Okay, dude, why don’t you try climbing three 8,000ers in two months.” (That’s what I’d done in 1995.) I’ve never claimed to be anything I’m not. I’ve never pretended to be a brilliant rock climber. And I’ve never put other climbers down, or denigrated their achievements.

Some of these critics seemed to operate from a double standard. They’d imply that I wasn’t a complete climber if I hadn’t done El Cap or led a 5.13 rock climb. Yet they themselves had never set foot on an 8,000-meter peak, let alone climbed one without supplemental oxygen. I’ve endured risks and hardships on 8,000ers that some other climbers could never imagine.

In the past, one climber would applaud another simply for succeeding, whether it meant putting up a new route or lending his face to an ad for an energy bar. We all pulled for one another to “make it.” A lot of the more recent sniping and criticism seems to be based on ignorance, jealousy, or just having too much free time with nothing else to do or talk about.