The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (12 page)

Their last village before the mountain was Askole. It too was a miserable collection of mud huts and fetid streams, but because the area was rich in grain fields, it was actually more prosperous than many of its neighboring villages downriver. The men camped in a dusty field swarming with flies and were constantly watched by the curious “natives” around them. Even though they tried to keep a watchful eye on their gear, food and equipment mysteriously disappeared in the night, and when the team left in the morning George and Jack were glad to be rid of the “robbers” and their squalid village.

In the third week of May, the team left the narrow gorges and entered the wide floodplains of the Braldu River. Instead of rope bridges the men crossed the one-to four-foot-deep glacial streams through the water. The closer to the mouth of the glacier they got, the more frequent and the more frigid the crossings became. Each time they approached a stream they took off their boots and socks, tied the shoelaces together, and slung the boots over their shoulders, and then braved the near-freezing water as they navigated the slippery rocks and low rapids which threatened to pull them off their feet with every cautious step. Still, the men all but ran across, screaming in agony as they danced through the icy torrents, the water feeling like knives stabbing their feet and lower legs. Sometimes the water was so deep their groins were submerged, and after stripping from the waist down the men shrieked with real and theatrical shock at the numbing pain as they waded half-naked through the water, their pants and boots held high over their heads. Reaching the other side, they danced about, slapping themselves on the buttocks and thighs until blood finally tingled back. As excruciating as it was wading through the rivers, it became a rite of passage, and the men performed it gamely and even a bit humorously, each daring the next to strip and scream his way across.

After one particularly long, deep, and painful crossing, the men sat rubbing their legs and feet and drying between their toes as they put their boots back on. Looking back across the stream, they saw Wiessner approach from the other side and take stock of the water. Instead of bending to take off his pants and shoes, he motioned to one of the porters and then, as Dudley and the other men watched with growing disbelief, Wiessner handed off his pack, jumped on the back of the porter, and rode the poor man across the stream, like a damsel in distress faced with a mud puddle. Dudley had seen many a Napoleonic tyrant during his time on the front lines and in the French Foreign Legion, but the younger men were astounded. They were learning that Fritz often acted more like a petty dictator than a leader; between his barking of orders and his deaf ear toward criticism, he was becoming a difficult personality for the young, brash Americans. At the next crossing, Fritz again handed off his pack and hopped onto the unfortunate porter’s back to be carried across. This time, the porter teetered on the slick, rocky bottom and, with a great splash, both men fell into the frigid stream. The rest of the team nearly fainted from laughing in the thin air. Fritz emerged from the stream soaking and furious and gave the men a withering look as they slapped their thighs and wiped tears of laughter from their eyes. At the next crossing, Fritz didn’t even hesitate; he just kept walking, boots, socks, and all, across the stream, and continued hiking when he got to the other side, all without a word.

After seemingly countless days trekking across this exotic wilderness, the team finally stepped onto the forty-mile-long Baltoro glacier, one of the greatest ice fields outside of the polar regions, and began their last fifty miles to base camp. Using their long, wood-handled ice axes as walking sticks, they navigated over the rocks and around crevasses following the Duke of Abruzzi’s hand-drawn map and the notes Charlie Houston had provided. Every day they climbed they gained another 1,000 feet in elevation, the maximum that could be expected of the porters with their 55-to 65-pound loads (after the ponies left them in Dassu, each porter’s load increased to avoid having to hire more men). The days grew cooler and the nights downright cold, cold that seeped up from the rocks and ice through their rubber air mattresses and sleeping bags and settled into their bones. They started wearing most of their clothes, their hats, and even gloves to bed. The porters didn’t have the luxury of extra clothing so the team distributed tarps which, Jack noted, “held in their warmth and their Balti stench” as they nestled together on the rocks and ice like sardines against the cold.

After their second night on the glacier, the team was waylaid for two days by storms at a rocky outcropping called Urdukas camp. The men felt a bit stir-crazy during the long days and restless nights as their bodies struggled with the increasing altitude.

In any gathering of men, be it an army unit, a college fraternity, or a mountaineering expedition, a repartee often develops where each man is assigned, and sometimes earns, a label: the funny one, the moody one, the quiet one, the difficult one, the controlling one. The 1939 expedition was no exception, particularly given the stark contrast in personalities: Fritz was undoubtedly “the moody boss,” Jack “the sharp-tongued wit,” George “the lighthearted party man,” Chap “the quiet and wise divinity student,” Tony “the fussy old man,” and, finally, Dudley “the reserved good egg.” As they got to know one another and learned how far each could be pushed with jokes, ribbing, and public humiliation, it was quickly determined that Fritz’s ability to laugh at himself was limited to a grunt of acknowledgment, while Jack’s tendency to jab and deride someone until their ribs were bloody and their feelings raw was endless. The men were finding that Jack was somewhat of a bully, quick to ridicule but loath to confront. While Chap and George’s personalities and the fact that they knew each other from Dartmouth provided comic relief after Jack’s acerbic attacks, Dudley remained aloof from most of the immature banter. Quick repartee and verbal volleying were not his style, so he simply withdrew. While his money had made the other men’s travel more enjoyable and some of their equipment possible, it probably also caused a lot of resentment, particularly from Jack, who had the least resources of any of them. As is often the case with resentment, it can surface as an attack. Then, when altitude is thrown into the mix, teams quickly become powder kegs of emotion, ambition, bravado, and humiliation. In short, expeditions can get ugly, in large part because high altitude often causes the same physical and emotional reactions as too much alcohol. While Jack had all the team members on a daily dose of vitamins, minerals, and yeast, he thought that perhaps a “temperance pill” might also be in order, given the team’s early personality conflicts.
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As the 1939 team got closer to K2, its members were already feeling uneasy. George complained that the Sherpas were as bad as “natives” and couldn’t make a decision to save their lives. Jack was not only being eaten alive by fleas, he was already suffering many of the classic symptoms of altitude sickness: headaches, insomnia, and a flu-like ache in his shoulders. And Dudley was becoming increasingly bothered by Fritz and Tony’s talk about the team being broke and about their use of his films and photographs once back in civilization. With the expedition’s debt high (and the Urdukas delay potentially costing each of them another $100
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), a few on the team were planning lectures and articles to help offset the team’s debt, not only to Dudley but to the American Alpine Club for Jack’s reduced fare. Some of the men apparently assumed they would have free access to the film that Dudley had bought and was now shooting on the expedition. Always getting the best of everything, from his commissioned yachts to his monogrammed Brooks Brothers shirts, Dudley had brought two top-of-the-line Leica cameras, a Zeiss Ikon box camera, and a Kodak 16mm movie camera, one of the first models to shoot color film. After their second day marooned at Urdukas, when mail runners took a load of letters back to Srinagar, Dudley sent several rolls of exposed film to his secretary, Henry Meyer, and included vehement instructions in the letter:

This was harsh language indeed for Dudley, particularly as he gave Henry no explanation as to why he was so concerned about the film getting into other hands. But with George, Jack, Tony, and Chap taking their own pictures, the only member left about whom Dudley could have been concerned was Fritz, the man who hated all things mechanical and who was never seen with a camera or even taking a single picture by any of his family or climbing partners in his entire life. Dudley, who already felt used by Fritz and perhaps the team, was not about to give the leader carte blanche with his photos or movie films.

After the storms cleared out of Urdukas the team continued up the glacier toward K2. As they got deeper into the Baltoro glacier valley, over forty 20,000-to 25,000-foot mountains rose around them, each more spectacular than the last. While Dudley, George, and Jack shot countless pictures, each admitted that there wasn’t a camera on earth that could capture the magnificence of these peaks and that their true beauty would live only in the men’s memory.

Three days up the glacier they neared Concordia, the confluence of the Baltoro and the Godwin–Austen glaciers, which, at 15,500 feet, sits higher in altitude than any point in the lower forty-eight states. There they spotted odd and fascinating ice formations. Getting close, the men again pulled out their cameras, trying to capture their beauty and solve their mystery as they clicked image after image.

Shaped like enormous frozen ships at full sail, these formations rose anywhere from 20 to 150 feet in the air, the light shimmering off their smooth blue-white opalescence as if from a giant gemstone. Jack, putting his mountain knowledge to the test, surmised they were formed by the pressure of the glacial movement pushing huge chunks into the sky which then melted into enormous, sail-like cones under the hot sun. George doubted the pressure theory but, not having any better explanation, he and the rest of the team let Jack have his geological guesswork as they climbed to the tops of the towers to take one another’s pictures.

As the men ticked off the last of their 330 miles they realized that except for the expected tired bones and fleas, they had traveled well. Finally, on May 30, the team rounded the last bend at the end of the Baltoro glacier and looked left.

There she stood, K2, still another ten miles down the Godwin–Austen Glacier, 28,250 feet rising out of the earth like a pyramid out of the desert—alone, majestic, and utterly in command of the lower peaks and glaciers at her feet. Nearly one thousand square miles of rock, ice, snow, avalanche gullies, hanging glaciers, crevasses, and constant wind, K2 sat before them as terrifying and spectacular as anything they had ever seen.

The men stood looking at the mountain as many explorers had before them—in silence as its power reverberated through their bellies. When they could speak, it was in hushed phrases:
Christ, just look at it
, and,
It’s unbelievable
. A few of the men later admitted to thinking,
What the hell am I doing here imagining I can climb that? Even the sight of it terrifies me.

In his journal, George wrote almost callously what he thought they were in for: “A trip like this, I believe, changes boys to men—they either come through or they don’t, and if they don’t, it is too damn bad. But if they do, they’ll be men. We shall see.”

On their last day of the trek, the lack of glacier goggles became a critical issue, as one porter after another fell to the snow holding his eyes and moaning in pain. Snow blindness occurs when the cornea and conjunctiva are burned by prolonged exposure to reflected light off the ice and snow. Like the severe sunburn it is, snow blindness inflames the eyes, can even swell them shut, and feels as if acid were being poured into them. The only cure is to cover the eyes completely, protecting them from all light with cool, damp cloths, while waiting for the inflammation and pain to subside.

The porters sat on the rocks, refusing to move another inch without glasses. With Fritz, Tony, and Chap far ahead, Jack, George, and Dudley set about cobbling together some makeshift eye protection out of cardboard, strips of polarized celluloid from a pair of Jack’s extra sunglasses, and string. They cut rectangles out of the cardboard, then narrow slits through which the porters could see, covering the slits with celluloid and then strapping these “glasses” to the porters’ heads. With base camp only a few hours further, the porters who could still see roped the blind men together and led them the final miles up the glacier. But five of the porters had pain so severe they could only lie writhing on the rocks. George scolded them to “Get up and get moving!” not quite understanding the degree of their anguish. Finally each man was given an aspirin and a cigarette, had his load taken from him, and was sent back to Askole. Then, burdened with double loads and a chain of battle-weary porters, the last members of the 1939 American expedition to K2 limped into base camp.

It was May 31. After nearly three months getting there, the team established itself on the cold, barren strip of undulating rock and ice at the base of the great K2. After 330 miles they now had “only” 12,000 vertical feet to their goal: the summit.

Climbing through the ice fall above base camp.
(Courtesy of the George C. Sheldon Family)

E
ventually K2 would become known as the Savage Mountain, for its unrelenting list of victims. But even in 1939, before a single man had climbed or been lost on the mountain, the mountain’s shape, size, weather, and remoteness reflected a savagery. As did its name: while other 8,000-meter peaks have lyrical names bestowed by local populations living at their base—Kangchenjunga, Cho Oyu, Shisha Pangma, and Chomolungma (the Tibetan name for Mount Everest, which is itself an elegant if colonialist name)—K2 has the bare, almost ruthless mark of its first official cartographer.

In 1856, T. G. Montgomerie was mapping the region for the Great Trigonometric Survey of India and saw two prominent peaks to the north and west. Sitting atop a hill in the Vale of Kashmir, Montgomerie pulled out his sketchbook and pencil and made a rough outline of the peaks, marking them K-1 and K-2, “K” for the Karakoram Range in which they sat.
Kara
, meaning black, and
koram
, meaning loose gravel, Karakoram aptly describes the volcanic rubble that covers the glaciers at the base of the mountains. Later, when Montgomerie tried to find a local name for the mountains, he found that K-1 was known as Masherbrum. K-2 however was so remote that although each village had its own name for the great peak—Chogori, Lanfafahad, Dapsang, Lamba Pahar—not one name was widely recognized. Rather than trying to decide which village’s name would become the official one, he simply left it as K-2 for the time being, thinking its proper name would reveal itself in time. Perhaps because the name so simply reflects the mountain’s harsh, cold, geometric presence, K2 has stuck. Now, over 150 years later, it is hard to imagine that any name could fit the mountain as well as the cartographer’s austere notation.

By the early 1900s, over thirty expeditions had explored the area, but only three had approached the mountain with the intent of climbing it: Oscar Eckenstein’s in 1902, which had among its climbers Aleister Crowley, a fascinating, devil-worshipping character who went by the moniker “666 The Beast”
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the Duke of Abruzzi’s expedition in 1909, which reached 21,870 feet; and Charlie Houston’s 1938 team, which reached 26,500 feet. It wasn’t until Houston’s so-called American Cowboys came so tantalizingly close to the summit that the world realized that not only could the mountain be conquered, it could be done by a relatively inexperienced team (only two of Houston’s men had been tested at altitudes above 20,000 feet) and without a battalion of support or supplemental oxygen on its upper reaches.

Still, even the somewhat bare-bones assault of Houston’s team depended on tons of equipment and a Herculean amount of work to get where they did on the mountain. Learning from Houston’s plan, Wiessner’s designed attack on the mountain was first to place ropes through the most treacherous sections of the 12,000-foot ascent from base to summit, thereby providing climbers with a measure of safety as they ascended and descended the mountain. Then they would build a series of nine or ten high camps roughly every 750 to 1,000 feet up the mountain, at which they would erect tents and stock them with food, extra sleeping bags, stoves, and fuel. Finally, through carrying loads from base camp to the lower camps, each climber would condition his own body for the ravages of the climb and the thin air above. Unlike the 14,000-foot mountains scattered throughout Europe and America, which can be climbed in a day, the Himalayas demand months of preparation, planning, conditioning, building, and then waiting as violent weather rolls through the mountains, often pushed without warning to hurricane force through the narrow valleys and fueled by monsoon rains from the Indian Ocean.
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All in all, high-altitude climbing is a test of body, mind, and will, in almost equal measures, and the 1939 team’s challenge was no different. Using only rough sketches of the Abruzzi Ridge, identified by both the duke and Houston as the mountain’s most climbable route, and several wide-scale photographs of K2 provided by Vittorio Sella, Fritz Wiessner and his team set about the arduous, weeks-long work of getting the camps set up on the mountain in order to support the men who would eventually attempt to reach the untouched summit. While Fritz didn’t have his desired team of talented climbers, he nonetheless arrived at the mountain with four strong and able men. Unbeknownst to him, half of his team would soon be out of the running, one due to illness and the other to fear.

W
HEN THE
1939 team finally put down their packs and chose the spot where their base camp tents would sit for the next two months, Jack looked up at the mountain and the world of ice and rocks around him and, instead of feeling like a conquering hero, he felt like a fraud. All he could think was, “We’re fucked. We are totally fucked.” The mountain was so much more than he could possibly have imagined. Looking around him at his teammates, he thought that none of them, certainly not himself nor the two other Dartmouth boys, and by the looks of them not the silver-spoon-fed Dudley Wolfe nor the mincing Tony Cromwell, had the experience for anything even half this size. As he busied himself with the work of setting up camp, a chilling thought kept creeping into his head and wouldn’t leave: “I am going to die here.”

In the morning, he faced the fear of someone else dying: his friend Chap Cranmer.

On the last day of their 330-mile trek into base camp, a porter had dropped a tarpaulin into a crevasse and, after the porter had failed to find it, Fritz had lowered Chap down to retrieve it. After searching for the tarp for well over an hour in the dark, wet caverns, he finally found it and was pulled to the surface, soaking wet and shaking uncontrollably. For whatever reason, Chap had worn shorts for the entire trek, even though his thin legs often turned an unsettling purple from the sun and the cold. Now, standing on the glacier in soaking wet cotton shorts and shirt, he was dangerously chilled. In the morning he said he didn’t feel well and by noon he was close to death. Thick phlegm choked his lungs, vomiting and diarrhea quickly stripped his body of liquids and nutrients, and a high fever put him in a moaning delirium. With Fritz and Tony having left on a reconnaissance trip to scout the Northeast Ridge and Joe Trench unable or unwilling to assist, that left Dudley, George, and Jack to take turns in the fetid tent, making sure that Chap was breathing and cleaning up after his explosions of excrement and vomit. Chap’s “clumsy nurses” all watched as the pile of rank sleeping bags continued to grow by the side of the tent. Soon they would run out entirely if they didn’t start washing those that had been fouled.

Through it all, Jack was in charge. At one point Chap began vomiting cupfuls of frothy liquid before the phlegm became so thick that he could scarcely breathe at all, and for two hours Jack gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to keep him alive. Other times he would rock Chap gently for hours, keeping the fluid moving through and out of his lungs. Whether Fritz had been unable or unwilling to hire a doctor to accompany the team is unknown, but in the absence of professional care Jack became the team’s physician. There was also an assumption that given his discounted fee, he would in effect “earn his daily bread” by performing extra duties.
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But it was a burden borne heavily by Jack, particularly as Chap’s illness went from grave to life-and-death. As night turned to day and then to night again, Jack sat vigil, holding a pail under Chap’s chin as he choked up cupfuls of viscous sputum and vomit, cleaned up when Chap eliminated streams of thick diarrhea into the sleeping bags, and continuously refilled tea bottles with hot water which he tucked around Chap to relieve some of his convulsive shivering. Dudley and George relieved Jack when they could, but because Chap was close to death, Jack was needed by his side nearly the entire time. He would later remark, “In all my years of medical practice, I never had a patient as sick as my first.” For his part, Chap muttered through his delirium that he felt as if he had only a “one in three chance” of pulling through. Even if he did, Jack feared, the pneumonia and dysentery
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had critically weakened him and it was doubtful he would ever be able to climb above base camp. He had also developed a peculiar odor, beyond the obvious effluvium of sickness, which Jack had no answer for although he hoped it wasn’t the smell of death.

Through all of Chap’s round-the-clock care, Jack became physically and emotionally undermined and his headaches, insomnia, and general ennui got worse. Given what he had been through, plus the 16,500-foot altitude of base camp, it’s scarcely surprising.

Meanwhile, their volunteer translator, Chandra, had been felled by mountain sickness and rolled about in his tent moaning and crying with a headache and nausea. Joe Trench, hired to be the locals’ liaison and advocate, sardonically commented, “There is nothing quite so sick as a native who thinks he is.” Several days later Chandra adjusted to the altitude but, like many on the team, he never fully recovered and he and the student from the school in Srinagar, Amarnath, often were more trouble than they were worth, as well as being terrific gossips. After several days of demanding more food and threatening legal action against the cook if he didn’t get it, Amarnath was sent packing and left base camp with the next set of mail runners.

Chap finally began to come around, and although he was still very weak his fever had come down from its high of 103 and he was able to take in fluids, although he repeatedly “blew”
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them all over the tent. A fine nurse as well as a promising doctor, Jack brought a wash basin of warm, soapy water to Chap’s bedside and gave him a sponge bath and then brushed his foul teeth and combed his hair. Chap felt almost human again.

With Fritz and Tony still on their recon of the Northwest and Abruzzi ridges, an increasingly lazy Joe Trench making excuses about having to handle paperwork, and Jack still tending to Chap, it was left to Dudley and George to properly establish base camp. First they moved the tents they had hastily erected upon arrival to better positions on the uneven rocks and further from the ever-threatening rockfall and avalanche-prone gullies. Then, with a much-improved Chap sitting in the sun in a camp chair wrapped in a sleeping bag, Dudley and George set about digging an ice house into the side of the glacier near the mess tent for the perishable food. As they dug, Jack yelled over to them not to waste too much time and energy building what he called an “unimportant ice chest.” Bruised by his disdain for their work but excited by their progress, Dudley and George kept on. It was hard work, made all the more exhausting by a blazing sun and temperatures close to 95 degrees. Somehow, none of them had thought base camp would be anything but a cold, icy place. But here it was, hotter than any beach they’d ever been on, and yet they were unable to take off their wool shirts and insulated pants for fear of blistering sunburn. Worn out by the stultifying midday heat, they were stunned by the sudden drop in temperature into the thirties when the sun disappeared behind the mountains to the west.

In the mornings, they broke the ice which had formed on their wash bucket in order to splash their faces. They chewed at their semi-frozen tubes of toothpaste, breaking up the slushy paste, sucking it out of the tube, and spitting it on the brush so that they could clean their teeth. Base camp felt as foreign and hostile as the surface of the moon.

After lunch on the third day, the men lifted Chap, who was still not walking, into the sun and then pulled their own chairs outside the mess tent and sat drinking tea. Excusing himself to arrange his climbing gear, Dudley retired to his tent. As Jack, Chap, George, and Joe basked in the sun, they saw Dudley’s feet poke out of his tent door wearing black velvet bedroom slippers.

Dudley’s three cameras, professional lenses, filters, tripods, and films, his nautical field glasses, state-of-the-art barometer and altimeter, endless supply of beautiful clothes and silk handkerchiefs, were certainly remarked on by his teammates, but somehow his extravagances were hard to dislike because he himself was so likeable. He was unfailingly generous. He had upgraded all of the men’s
Biancamano
tickets to first class and bought more rounds of drinks and dinners than all the other men combined. He also could be a hell of a lot of fun. Although for the most part a shy and retiring man, he would sometimes break into song, regaling the men in what George called a “pleasant but untrained voice” with tunes he’d learned from foul-mouthed sea captains, adolescent prep school boys, and wounded troops on the front lines in Italy. His stories were peppered with fabulous anecdotes of trench warfare, rogue waves off the Grand Banks, and the secret ceremonies of a Harvard Final Club—perfect entertainment for the otherwise mundane and utterly male nights at base camp. In an environment where, according to high-altitude climbers who have suffered many months-long expeditions, all conversation eventually devolves into “food, shit, and sex—what goes in, what comes out, and what goes in and out,” Dud provided an element of class and humor. Still, the slippers raised eyebrows to a new notch.