The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (24 page)

In telling Groth of Wolfe’s fateful decision to remain at Camp VII while Fritz and Pasang descended, Fritz insinuated that a sluggish ineptitude was the root of the problem. Groth wrote:

The degree to which Jack and Fritz criticized Dudley’s “sheer laziness” was interesting, given that while climbing the mountain it was his slow pace and clumsiness mostly on the steeper sections that troubled the men. In fact, in listing what each team member would carry from day to day, Fritz had assigned equal loads to Dudley and Jack.
^*
Further, Jack had only witnessed Dudley’s climbing and carrying of loads in the earliest days when the team was still low on the mountain, and then once between Camps V and VI when he himself collapsed. Other than that, Jack and Dudley spent no time together on the mountain.

By the time Groth wrote his report, Tony Cromwell had discredited himself, not only by writing and sending the inflammatory letter to the AAC, but in having left base camp with Wolfe still on the mountain. In fact, Groth seemed to be the only evaluator of the tragedy who publicly narrowed the focus to Cromwell, questioning why he ordered the lower camps stripped and then why he and Jack Durrance did nothing days later when the Sherpas descended with all of the high camps’ gear. These actions, Groth felt, were the final and most devastating blows to the expedition.

After his day-long discussion with Groth, Fritz sat down and wrote Alice Wolfe a lengthy letter expressing his regret and sorrow. While it spoke of the “dreadful disaster” and how “depressed” he was about not being able to have had a “more active hand in the rescue attempts” of Dudley, his first and foremost regret was in not achieving the summit: “I have never been hit so hard in my life, first to lose the summit which seemed in my hands, and then the terrible realisation of Dudley’s and the Sherpas death, and now a war.”

Then he began the unhappy work of gathering Dudley’s belongings and sending them to the American consulate in Karachi, from which they would be shipped to America. In addition to two locked suitcases full of items Dudley hadn’t needed on the mountain (presumably including the tuxedo and gold cufflinks) which he had left in Srinagar, Fritz detailed what he had packed up from Dudley’s tent at base camp. Curiously, the list he compiled on September 11, 1939, included a diary, but by the time Dudley’s effects were catalogued by the US consul general several months later, the diary was not listed. Given Fritz’s earlier curiosity about Jack’s diary and his reported breaking into Jack’s base camp tent to read it, perhaps Dudley’s created just too much temptation for him. Or maybe it simply got lost in the long transit home. Also missing from the final shipment home to Maine were Dudley’s movie camera and his final rolls of film from high on the mountain. They were never officially accounted for.

A
FTER SOME WORRY
that transatlantic travel would be curtailed for months because of the war, commerce began to move again by mid-September and Tony Cromwell finally managed to book passage on the USS
Harrison
out of Bombay on September 24. Meanwhile, Fritz was still managing the expedition’s last diplomatic affairs and getting Dudley’s effects sent home to Boston. Unable to leave as scheduled on the
Harrison
, he flew on a noisy DC-3 to Alexandria the following week, caught up with the boat on October 6, and sailed home from there. One can only imagine the look on Tony’s face when he saw Fritz, whom he thought he’d seen the last of in Srinagar, embark in Egypt. It is unknown if the two ever spoke on the boat, although it’s possible. Shortly into the weeks-long passage, Fritz was thrown out of bed in rough seas and badly wrenched his back. He spent the rest of the trip in his cabin.

Jack also had been eager to part company with Fritz, but he was evidently not anxious to get home. He lingered for two more months in India and then Europe before finally boarding a ship out of Naples headed for New York on November 26. An interesting and unanswered question is: how did the penurious student pay for it?

I
N
S
T
. A
NTON
, Austria, Alice sat in her small living room and wept rare tears for the man she loved. In her hand she held Fritz’s telegram:
DUDLEY WITH THREE SHERPAS LOST VICINITY CAMP SEVEN ACCIDENT CAUSE UNKNOWN AS SEVERE CONDITIONS PREVENTED THEIR RECOVERY THIS SEASON STOP DEEPEST SORROW FELT BY ALL STOP
.

As she struggled with her warring emotions, she had a small sense of comfort in knowing that at least Dudley would have been proud to die on the mountain. He had been so adamant about going, so sure that this expedition was his destiny, she had felt powerless to even try to talk him out of it. So perhaps it was his destiny and perhaps he was at peace.

He had been such a rare presence in her life, a man who kept her guessing. Yes, he had been reserved, withdrawn even, but always gentle and charming, generous and kind, to her and to everyone who crossed their threshold. Unlike his staid family in Maine, he had relished people with exotic last names and foreign accents, interesting people with stories to tell. He had loved finding his Jewish uncle and cousins in London and sharing their life, so different from his own, so full of music and laughter and lively debate around the dinner table. The Wolfs, as well as his own experiences on the ocean and on the front lines, had opened him to worlds beyond the gated stone walls of Warrenton Park in Maine, and perhaps, she thought, he’s happier there, high on that mountain.

That afternoon she sorted through Dudley’s letters and postcards, putting them into two piles, one containing more of their personal history than she cared to share, and the other with his more newsy, impersonal letters from the expedition. With tears streaming down her face, she walked to the small stove in the corner of her living room and burned the first stack. She tied the second stack into a bundle and tucked it into her suitcase. She would deliver it to Clifford, Dudley’s brother, when she returned to America next month, if she could ever make it out of Austria.

Alice felt Dudley’s loss as a great void she could never quite fill. While she soon remarried and lived well into her seventies, years after Dudley’s death she wrote Fritz that she was haunted by his memory. “I still think about poor Dudley lying up there in the snow and probably will until I die.”

I
N LATE
A
UGUST
, Gwen Wolfe Rochester Sharpe arrived at Clifford Lodge, the massive house her grandfather had built overlooking the ocean in Rockport, with her sons, Dudley and Paul, whom she had just picked up from their summer camp down the coast. Young Dudley had particularly loved spending the summer sailing on the
Kestrel
, one of his Uncle Dudley’s sloops which he had loaned to the camp for the summer.

As the car rounded the last bend in the long drive in from the main road, young Paul looked at the enormous house appearing over the hillock and exclaimed, “What is that, a hotel?” Indeed, it looked like one with its three stories, great chimneys at either end of the mansard roof, a striped awning on each window, the wrap-around covered porch, and, on the drive, a grand entranceway through which horse-drawn carriages once delivered guests to the front door.

Clifford Wolfe Smith met them on the top stair of the porch. His face was drawn with sorrow.

“Gwen, I have something terrible to tell you.”

She stopped in her tracks, as did the boys, stunned by the heavy grief in his words. They somehow knew what was coming next.

“We’ve lost Dudley. He’s gone.”

The boys stood and watched as their mother and their Uncle Clifford embraced and quietly wept on the porch for what seemed like hours, although it was only a few minutes. Then, Gwen turned and took young Dudley’s hand and led him up to what was still considered her room in the vast house.

“Please, sit with me, would you?” she asked her eldest son and her brother’s namesake. She adored Clifford and had loved the dashing Grafton, but it was her brother Dudley whom she had cherished most. She felt his loss like a physical blow.

Dudley Rochester sat with his mother, not quite knowing what to do or say in the face of this new aspect of her: grieving sister. He was only eleven years old and he remembered his uncle more as a myth than as a man. His mother had always talked about her brother in terms of great adventure and daring exploits. But he loved what he remembered, and, like his mother, he already missed Dudley. He had last seen him the summer before, when his uncle had arrived out of the blue in his two-seater roadster for a visit at their farm in Arlington, Vermont. It had been a fine visit, but all too short; as the larger-than-life man headed back down the driveway the next day, young Dudley stood on the porch wishing he had stayed longer. Beside him, the boy’s father said something which struck the ten-year-old as very strange:

“I don’t know why, but I think that is the last time we’ll ever see him.”

It was not like his straightforward father to use such melodramatic words, and the boy never forgot them. He turned back to look down the drive and saw his Uncle Dudley’s car disappear around the last bend in a cloud of dust.

Later that month, Gwen and Clifford greeted scores of Dudley’s friends, sailing crews, and college classmates at a memorial service in Camden. Without a body to bury, they sat looking at a formal portrait of Dudley draped in black velvet on the altar, remembering the shy smile and gentle power of the man they all loved.

W
ITHIN THE WEEK
, Clifford began his assault. Not knowing what to do with his grief and anger, he turned to the only action he could think of: he started an investigation into why his brother had been left for dead halfway around the world. How did Dudley die? Why was he abandoned on the mountain? Who was with him? Did they die also? Who was in charge and where was he when Dudley was left at the high camp? And why were they not able to bring his body home?

While he waited for the team to return from India, Clifford did his research. He reread every letter the team had written from base camp back to the American Alpine Club, and every one that Dudley had written to him, Gwen, Alice, and his secretary, Henry Meyer. He had the American Alpine Club investigated and its financing and lease in lower Manhattan looked into. He examined Dudley’s last will and testament, looking for anything out of kilter. And he learned more about the world of high-altitude mountaineering than he had ever cared to.

Once the expedition members started arriving home, Clifford began scheduling depositions, starting with George Sheldon and Chappell Cranmer, who were the first to return to the States in late September.

After Chap and George had left base camp, they relished every step taken away from the mountain and promised each other that their future climbing would be kept to Wyoming, Colorado, and Canada. After hearing that Dudley had been left sick and weak at Camp VII to await rescue, they both shook their heads, fearing he would never be able to make it down alive. “It’s fine to be back,” George wrote in Srinagar, “but it’s not too good having those other blokes still left out to the mercy of Herr Wiessner.” As he and Chap left Bombay for Genoa at the end of August, they received a telegram confirming their worst fears: Dudley and three Sherpas had died. Days later they received another from Jack and Fritz: “
WITHHOLD ALL EXPEDITION COMMENT
,” it warned. Trouble lay ahead for all of them. The firestorm had begun.

On the crossing from Genoa to New York, they struck up a conversation with a handsome, well-dressed woman who lived in both Austria and New York. She asked what they had been up to in Europe, with America on the brink of war. As they began to tell her of the expedition, her face froze. The woman was Alice Wolfe. After she and the men recovered from the shocking coincidence of their meeting, she bought them all a bottle of champagne to share and asked, begged them for every detail they could remember of Dudley and the expedition. George was pleased, and a bit surprised, at how nice she was to them.

Once George was back at Dartmouth, his frostbitten feet completely healed—except for “feeling the cold,” as all frostbite victims do—but Chap ended up in the hospital, weak from persistent diarrhea. Given his recent exposure to the remote reaches of the Himalayas, the doctors treated him for dysentery and looked no further. It would be years and many more illnesses before Chap’s celiac disease was finally diagnosed.

In early October, Clifford Smith, his attorney, Herbert Connell, and a stenographer traveled to Dartmouth, where they formally deposed George and Chap. Chap arrived forty-five minutes late for the meeting, having been detained in a “Rec”—or Recreation—class. Insulted by what he saw as Chap’s rudeness at keeping him waiting for a game of squash, Clifford was brusque with the two young men. For their part, George and Chap “did a good job of saying nothing,” as they later reported to Fritz. Apparently unaware that Clifford Smith was in fact Dudley Wolfe’s brother, they offered no condolences. Instead, the young men detailed their own climbing resumés and how much climbing they had done without guides, insinuating that Dudley had died because of his inexperience. Clifford wasn’t impressed with them, particularly as he knew that both had spent most of the expedition at base camp. Nonetheless, he questioned them about the expedition, its leadership and planning, the trek, the organization, and the team’s movement up the mountain. Given that the men had left base camp before the crisis, they could offer little as to what had happened to Dudley and the Sherpas. In closing, Clifford asked them about the ownership of the films, showing them Dudley’s letter written from Urdukas about not allowing any member of the expedition access under any circumstances. Chap and George looked at each other and then at Clifford as they handed the letter back to him. Both agreed that until the matter of the ownership was cleared up, they wanted nothing to do with Dudley’s remaining films, and Clifford needn’t bother to send them copies of the film and negatives.