The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (14 page)

Adding to this troubled mix was Jack’s chronic list of physical maladies, from toothaches to headaches to cold feet to “feeling like shit—winded and despondent,” to sharing Tony’s frustration with their autocratic and often absent warlord. As Jack’s inability to climb grew more evident, his outlook became darker. Adding to his misery and frustration was his lack of good climbing boots. Having left America with only three days’ notice, he had had to order climbing boots in Europe and now awaited their delivery at base camp. In the meantime, his feet froze in thin leather ski boots designed for day trips on the mountains of New England, not the Himalayas.

Finally, George Sheldon’s inexperience and immaturity began to be a real problem. Fritz knew when he signed Sheldon onto the team that the college junior was young and had never done much climbing outside of a Dartmouth club event, but he had hoped that George’s youth and energy would serve their efforts on K2. Instead, Sheldon had proven to be a brash prankster who, like Jack, enjoyed his alcohol a bit too much, something the austere Fritz found worrisome. Now, as they were getting their teeth into the climb, Fritz saw that George was also unpredictable, as if he simply lacked the will to focus on the task at hand. As he watched George continue to struggle with the rope in one hand and his ice axe in the other, frequently getting tangled into a dangerous knot, Fritz wondered how he was ever going to get this boy up, never mind off, the mountain. It was not unwarranted criticism; George himself agreed with Fritz’s loud and frequent harangues about how careless and unfocused he was. While George couldn’t put his finger on exactly why his head wasn’t into the climb, he did very little to get it there, and, like a homesick child at summer camp, he started counting the days until the team would depart for home. With sleep increasingly difficult at altitude, he was also self-medicating with phenobarbital, a sleeping aid which suppresses breathing—exactly what he shouldn’t have been doing.

One of the body’s primary reactions to the loss of oxygen in the atmosphere is to breathe more rapidly to obtain the same amount of oxygen; this in turn causes a reduction in carbon dioxide in the blood. Because a buildup of CO
₂
is a stronger indicator to the body that it is time to breathe than is a reduction of oxygen, a balancing act arises between the two triggers. When awake, a person can consciously breathe when necessary, but asleep, the lack of a CO
₂
trigger can cause a person to stop breathing for up to fifteen seconds at a time, eventually waking in a choking gasp for breath. Finally, as if the sleep apnea weren’t bothersome enough, the kidneys excrete more fluid during acclimatization, so that a frequent need to urinate during the night also prevents a person from getting sound, restful sleep. All in all, George was not a happy man.

Meanwhile, Dudley was going strong. It was as if all his years of quiet focus on straightforward goals—whether points on a map thousands of miles away across an ocean or wounded soldiers who needed to be taken from a trench to a dressing station—had finally come together and enabled him to thrive in the harsh environs. Climbing a mountain, even a Himalayan giant like K2, was a very clear goal to Dudley when looked at through his objective lens:
Here is the mountain, here are the obstacles, and this is what I have to do to get there.
He had trained, he had studied other expeditions, and he had obtained the best equipment. Now all he had to do was put his nose into the wind and go. And he did, with the slow determination that was his style. At one point, as he rested on the rope, he looked toward the Northeast Ridge and saw a tremendous avalanche break loose from its upper reaches and roar down the slope, gathering fury and width as it reached terminal velocity thundering down the mountain. Traveling at close to 150 miles per hour, it hit the glacier with such force that it filled the valley with a 3,000-foot cloud of snow, dusting the lower mountain with a fresh coat of powder. Dudley looked above him at the rocky ridge and was suddenly very glad they weren’t attempting the less difficult but far more avalanche-prone slopes on either side of the Abruzzi.

Above Camp II, where the terrain grew steeper and icier, Dudley’s already deliberate pace slowed to inches, rather than feet, per minute. When their heavy steel crampons became too awkward to use on the mixed terrain of rock and ice, Dudley and the team relied on nails pounded into the soles of their leather hiking boots for traction, like an early version of studded snow tires. But the Sherpas, with the exception of the one or two who would be on the summit team, had not been issued the expensive crampons, so when the team encountered slopes so smooth they appeared polished, Fritz had to cut steps into the ice with his axe. Unfortunately, the steps did little to tame the precarious slickness of the ice, and the pace of the climb slowed to a crawl.

One day, with Jack, Tony, and Dudley on the same rope, the frustration over Dudley’s slow and awkward climbing became more than Jack and Tony could bear, and in Camp II that night, both angrily accused Dudley of poor climbing and said that he had no business being on the mountain. Tony, still smarting from Fritz’s criticism of his deputy leadership, seemed eager to have someone else to blame for their slow progress. Dudley fired back, saying he had done his fair share of work, carried just as many loads, and if indeed he was slow on the rope through dangerous sections, it was for good reason; it was difficult climbing and he was not going to sacrifice prudence for their impatience. He was here to climb this mountain whether Jack or Tony or anybody else liked it. Besides, he charged, looking at Jack, it seemed to him that he was the only one actually climbing this mountain, while Jack was the one constantly complaining about his physical ailments and bad boots.

It was not a point Jack could argue, particularly after a recent load carry in which he was forced to crawl on all fours, dragging his belly over the rocks imagining he looked like the Little Engine That Could, puffing “I think I can, I think I can” as he pulled himself up the mountain.

Later, some would speculate that Dudley and Fritz had made an almost client–guide arrangement, whereby Fritz would get Dudley to the summit in exchange for the wealthy man’s greater financial investment in the team. But, given Dudley’s concerns about money and his feelings of being taken advantage of by Fritz and some of the other men on the team, that scenario seems implausible. What does seem possible is that Fritz and Jack had an agreement whereby Jack took on more work, given his discounted fee. Agreement or no, Jack resented the extra labor and was jealous of Dudley’s physical success on the mountain while also being truly worried that the older, slower man was going to get in trouble the higher he went.

Even though Jack was intimidated by the mountain and its demands, as well as his own physical limitations at altitude, he nonetheless pulled Fritz aside and again urged him not to take Dudley any higher on the mountain. He told Fritz that no one without the skills and experience to descend alone should be allowed to climb into what would become a trap.

Fritz would hear none of it. He pointed his finger in Jack’s face and said, “You listen to me, Jack! I tell you, if we get up, we shall all be the most famous alpinists in the world!”

Jack looked at him and thought,
I have a fanatic on my hands
.

The conversation was over. Jack backed down.

The next day, Dudley talked to Fritz about the confrontation. While he had heard Jack’s concerns about his preparedness for the mountain above them, he couldn’t help but marvel at how the others seemed to spend their days grumbling and complaining about nearly every aspect of the arduous expedition: the food, the weather, the rest of the team, and most of all, the mountain. They seemed unprepared for the full challenge of a Himalayan mountain and demoralized by its sheer size and relentless demands. Perhaps because he was older and literally battle-tested, Dudley had remained unflinching in the face of K2’s daunting presence looming above them and instead focused on the immediate piece of mountain at his feet. He also realized how similar climbing was to sailing; at its best, mountaineering taught a man to live in the environment and, like the killer storms off the coast of Ireland, the harsh challenges of K2 were something he relished.

Still, the public rebuke of his climbing worried him. He did not want to be a burden to the team or an embarrassment to himself. He particularly didn’t want to endanger anyone, himself included. The next day, he took even more care with every step, making sure to watch and learn from Fritz’s moves.

While Jack found Dudley’s slow technique bothersome, one of K2’s legendary hazards positively terrified him: rockfall. K2 is a mountain of volcanic rubble covered with layers of ice and crumbling rocks which shed constantly, particularly as the sun melts them out of the surface layers. A whirring hum was the men’s only warning before rocks of all sizes showered around them with terrifying randomness. Some came within inches, some flew past and exploded on the slopes below, others nicked at their packs and bruised their legs. Charlie Houston’s 1938 team likened it to trying to climb a slate roof piled high with rocks. For many, the intermittent rockfalls were the most petrifying aspect of the entire climb because they came with no warning and there was almost nothing one could do to avoid a rock traveling at terminal velocity. In essence, it was the world’s highest crap shoot and Jack didn’t like his odds.

O
N
J
UNE
20, only two weeks into the climb, Dudley, Fritz, and George, whom Fritz still hoped would shape up and become a strong member of the team, made a carry from Camp II to Camp IV at 21,500 feet, where they waited for Jack and several Sherpas to follow the next day. Instead, a storm blew in, keeping Jack and the others low on the mountain while trapping the three of them in a tiny tent as the blizzard and hurricane-force winds soon made even leaving the tent suicidal.

K2’s wind is legendary, and while all of the famed 8,000-meter peaks regularly suffer violent wind, K2’s is nearly constant. Climbers who have survived the mountain talk of how it penetrates everything—tents, sleeping bags, and clothes—and even months after they have returned from the mountain, they can still feel the chill of that wind.

Day after day the storm battered the men at Camp IV, sounding like a freight train coming through a tunnel at full power, its wind gusts flattening the tent so that the men had to push their backs into the fabric to keep it aloft and take some of the pressure off the poles before they snapped in half. Fearing that a sudden gust would pick up the tent and blow them into Tibet, the men sat and lay in the cramped quarters, trying not to lose their minds. With their heavy books left behind in base camp, boredom forced them to read aloud the labels on their cans of food. After they had exhausted that activity, they fell silent again, staring at the bucking and straining tent around them.

Two days later, Dudley picked up his journal and saw the date printed on the page: June 22. On the other side of the world Harvard was hosting his class’s tenth reunion and here he was, hoping to survive hurricane winds and subzero temperatures while sitting 21,000 feet up a Himalayan peak. The red and white tents in the Yard that he visualized, the Radcliffe women in their straw hats and white gloves, the Harvard men in top hats and tails, and the robed commencement speaker intoning from the steps of the Harvard Chapel couldn’t have made a starker contrast to the tiny tent perilously perched on K2.

Dudley did his best to keep Fritz and George entertained with songs and stories, describing in great detail the yacht cruise he would take them on to tropical paradises, but his audience was often unreceptive and he too would grow quiet again, mesmerized as he watched the sides of the tent flexing and releasing in the wind, which reminded him of the
Highland Light
when she was at full sail. All the while, he massaged his feet hoping to ward off frostbite; he had felt the first nip a few days before and knew that the only cure at this altitude was warmth and circulation. He had to keep the blood moving through his toes.

Next to him, Fritz tried to keep focused on the task at hand: climbing the mountain. He wrote a long note for Tony at base, detailing the team’s actions for when the weather cleared, instructing that the porters for the march out should be ordered for arrival in base camp on July 17. If the weather didn’t cooperate, then the team would have to split, with twenty porters and a Sherpa and a sahib (if one was available) leading the first half out on the 17th, and those still on the mountain following toward the end of the month.

As he wrote, he watched the tent bucking against the wind and worried about the strength of the fabric, knowing that even a small tear would allow the wind to shred the tent in minutes. He thought the constant “bang, bang, bang” of the tent sounded like claps of thunder. Even after years of mountain expeditions, this was the most terrifying storm of his life and he huddled against its fury, waiting for the next gust to rip the tent open and blow them off the mountain. God knows it had happened before on Himalayan peaks. He just wished the god-awful racket would stop. He suddenly understood shell shock and why boys came home from the battlefield with dull eyes that stared off into space. He now knew why they lost their minds; the brain can process only so much noise before it shuts down, and he felt like he was about to lose his mind.

Nearby, George was also flirting with insanity. All he wanted to do was run—get out of the tent and just start running. He knew it was a crazy notion and that even trying to stand on the steep, wind-blown ice in this furor would mean instant death. The wind felt like a solid wall of force. But if it didn’t end soon, and if he didn’t stretch his legs and get some blood moving through his body, he would become a raving maniac. He could barely feel his toes. They went from painfully cold to numb and he didn’t know which he preferred; at least when they hurt he knew there was blood flowing. Now they were numb, and he knew that meant the blood had gone from freezing to frozen in his veins. If they didn’t thaw soon, the tissue would die. He spent his already sleepless nights trying to massage blood into his toes as the thought of losing them to frostbite terrified him. Compounding his miseries was the Primus stove which leaked gasoline fumes and added dizziness and nausea to his now constant headache.