K2 (34 page)

The most expensive expedition I ever went on was Jim Whittaker’s International Peace Climb of Everest in 1990, because we Americans footed the bill not only for ourselves but for the Russian and Chinese climbers as well. Far more typical of my expeditions, though, would be one like my last attempt on Annapurna, in 2005. With only three climbers on the team—Jimmy Chin, Veikka Gustafsson, and myself—that trip cost us only $18,000, even though we indulged in the luxury of helicoptering in to base camp.

Another sign of the times, and of just how nationalistic an enterprise K2 was for the Italians, emerges from the fact that a substantial part of their budget was raised by the Club Alpino Italiano (CAI), which solicited contributions from its members. That kind of appeal sure wouldn’t fly today! If I’d hit up AAC members for contributions so I could go to Annapurna in 2005, I doubt that I would have found very many checks filling my mailbox. On the other hand, in 1954 there was no such thing as a climber being sponsored by equipment companies. Nowadays, we’re on our own when it comes to raising money for an expedition—we’re no longer carrying the banner of the good old U.S. of A.

By late autumn of 1953, Desio and his cronies in the CAI had made a list of twenty-three climbers to be invited to audition for the expedition. Desio chose his scientists by word of mouth, but the climbers had to undergo a much more rigorous screening. In the winter of 1952–53, Houston had whittled his roster of applicants down from about twenty-five to five, but his process, while relatively stringent, had required only a brief interview in Exeter, New Hampshire (and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, Dee Molenaar didn’t even have to fly east to get chosen). Desio instead organized a pair of winter mountain training runs in the Alps, which doubled as tryouts. In
Ascent
he solemnly ticks off the qualities sought in the candidates: “good health and physical fitness, strength of character and iron determination, mental preparedness and a readiness for the task at hand based on recent mountaineering experience. All other qualities were of secondary importance.”

The candidates first assembled in mid-January on a glacial plateau near Cervinia for a ten-day camp. The men, as Desio reported, were put through their paces as they found themselves “taking part in various climbing exercises on rocks and ice, practis[ing] setting up tents on the western spur of the Little Matterhorn, conveying packages along a specially-constructed light rope-way, communicating with one another by portable radio, etc.” At the end of the ten days, some doctors hiked up to the plateau to administer “psycho-physical tests.” Afterward, a panel of thirteen self-styled experts cut two of the candidates from the list.

To me, the whole thing sounds both brutal and ridiculous. It’s pretty tough to forge brotherhood when you’re competing with the guy on the other end of the rope for a place on the team. You can’t build an effective team based only on the skill levels of the climbers, and mutual respect and trust can’t be dictated from on high. Near the beginning of my climbing career, from 1980 to 1982, I tried out with Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. (RMI) in hopes of landing a job as a Rainier guide, and I got hired only on my third attempt. But RMI handled the whole business in a pretty humane way; the veterans explained that they were seeking a combination of people skills and mountaineering talent. Just because you were a phenomenal climber didn’t mean you would make a good guide. You had to be a patient teacher and show compassion for your clients. All of that made sense to me.

By the 1990s, no American expedition to an 8,000er had ever run its candidates through a training mill like the one Desio concocted. On the other hand, to this day the Russians—despite the collapse of the Soviet Union—maintain an equally Spartan tryout procedure. They’ll get a bunch of climbers together in the Caucasus and tell them to race one another up some mountain. The fastest six or so make the grade: “Okay, you guys get to go to Kangchenjunga.” As for brotherhood, the Russians are told, “You
will
get along.”

It sounds absurd, but you wouldn’t believe how hard the Russians fight for those slots. In the USSR, the top climbers got the title of “Master of Sport,” as well as such additional perks as a free apartment and a car.

From February 16 to 26, 1954, the CAI ran its second tryout camp on Monte Rosa, after Mont Blanc the second-highest peak in the Alps. The team was then whittled down to the eleven men who supposedly performed the best, but before they could count on going to K2, each man had to pass ear, nose, throat, and dental exams as well as receive a “prescribed course of vaccination.”

Only one of those eleven would go on to be a truly world-class mountaineer. That man was the youngest of the eleven, twenty-four-year-old Walter Bonatti, who earned his living as a hutkeeper near his hometown
of Monza. Despite his youth, Bonatti already had a better record than any of his teammates on cutting-edge routes in the Alps. On K2, he would end up as the pivotal figure in the dark controversy that would forever tarnish the Italian triumph—a controversy that would still burn half a century later.

One shocking result emerged from the tryout camps. Ricardo Cassin, the greatest climber in Italy in 1954, was rejected. The official explanation was that he had failed a medical test, but climbers all over Italy knew better. Fifty-two years after the expedition, and five years after Desio’s death at the astonishing age of 104, one of the principal K2 climbers, Lino Lacedelli, set the record straight:

In his own way, Cassin took his revenge for being snubbed. In 1958, he played a crucial role in the first ascent of Gasherbrum IV in the Karakoram, as Walter Bonatti and Carlo Mauri reached the summit, setting a new standard of difficulty in the Karakoram and the Himalaya. And in 1961, at the age of fifty-two, he led the first Italian team to climb in Alaska since the Duke of the Abruzzi in 1897, as they tackled the un-climbed south face of Mount McKinley. Despite incurring serious frostbite, all six members reached the summit. The beautifully direct route, known today simply as “the Cassin,” is the most storied line on North America’s highest peak. In January 2009, Cassin himself turned one hundred years old.

Rereading
Ascent of K2
today, I was struck by how completely unaware Desio was of the semicomic consequences of the gargantuan logistical effort required to keep his marching army in motion. From Skardu to Askole, for instance, the 500 porters so far employed by the Italians consumed 1,100 pounds of flour
per day
. There wasn’t anything like that reserve of grain in the region, so other porters had to hurry ahead to lay in depots of flour at Askole.

I’ve seen this happen on even smaller expeditions. You end up needing porters to carry the food for the other porters, who are in turn carrying food and gear for the Europeans. This makes for a huge logistical headache, but it’s unavoidable on long approach hikes. If, as is often said, an army marches on its stomach, these massive caravans are in constant danger of grinding to a halt.

At Urdukas, appalled by the wintry conditions of early May, the porters at first refused to go on. This delay meant that the team immediately needed another thousand pounds of flour, so Desio sent porters back to Askole to haul up the reserves that had been stocked in previous weeks. The caravan finally got going again, but it was no surprise that the porters called an all-out strike at Concordia. Unless the team could get its sixteen tons of stuff up the last ten miles to base camp, the expedition was doomed. Desio sounds dumbfounded by this “desertion” on the part of the porters: “Thereupon they dumped their loads and, uttering hostile shouts and singing religious songs, returned that same evening the way they had come. I was perplexed and disconcerted.”

It took the intervention of the liaison officer (the same Pakistani who had served admirably on Houston’s expedition) to sort out the mess and, in effect, bribe enough porters to carry the loads the rest of the way to base camp. It was only because the team had left Italy so early in the season that, despite all the delays en route from Skardu, they were well established at base camp by May 29.

As the 1953 American team had done, the Italians hired Hunzas from Gilgit to serve as high-altitude porters. Those thirteen men would play a far more essential role on the Abruzzi Ridge than did the Hunzas in ‘53, who never went above Camp III. Two of the Hunzas would go as high as
the Italian Camp VIII, at 25,300 feet, and one of them, Amir Mahdi, would perform a heroic deed that would lead directly to the team’s eventual success and to the bitter controversy that spun out of it. Yet Desio’s narrative credits the Hunzas’ work only in the most cursory way.

One measure of how tedious
Ascent of K2
is as an account of the expedition is that the reader doesn’t get to Skardu until page 94, to base camp until page 122—more than halfway through the 239-page book. And rather than seem the slightest bit embarrassed by his party’s logistical overkill, Desio revels in it. That’s a very 1950s attitude: the more gear and food, the more porters, the author implies, the more serious the expedition. It would take another couple of decades before a lightweight approach to the world’s highest mountains would start to seem purer and bolder than a massive army-style assault.

Desio also revels in his role as generalissimo. Before leaving Skardu, the leader took a flight around K2 in a plane flown by Pakistani pilots. There was absolutely no need for that flight for reconnaissance, since the climbers knew they were going to tackle the Abruzzi Ridge, about which they had learned everyting they needed to know from the Americans in Rawalpindi. But Desio devotes eight humdrum pages of his book to this joyride. It all falls vaguely under the heading of “Science” with a capital “S.” As Desio sums up this aerial diversion,

When I first read that paragraph, I had to look up “orographical.” It means “having to do with the branch of physical geography dealing with mountains.” I rest my case.

As early as May 26, four climbers started up the Abruzzi, hoping to discover the site of the Americans’ Camp II. (The launch of the climb that was the expedition’s central focus does not appear until page 138 of the book.) Before they could get started, though, the mountaineers were required to digest a route guide their leader had prepared.

That guide, reprinted in full in
Ascent
, represents a classic case of micromanaging from the rear. The leader at base camp, with his binoculars or telescope, thinks he can direct the climbers on the route better than they can themselves. A sample:

Whether or not Desio got the idea from Pete Schoening’s A-frame tripod, which the Americans had used to haul loads up House’s Chimney, the Italians brought along a thousand-foot-long steel cable and constructed a pair of windlasses, crank-operated hauling devices. This apparatus would serve to lug vast quantities of gear over stretches as long as a thousand feet, all the way up to Camp V, at 22,000 feet. On June 2, Desio found a small saddle on the Godwin Austen Glacier; from there he supervised the first attempt to use a windlass to get loads to Camp II. “All went well,” he reported.