The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (26 page)

When Clifford pressed him on Dudley’s fitness as a climber, Jack admitted that Dudley was stronger and more suited to altitude than he, but he asserted his belief that Dudley had no business being on the mountain:

And finally:

No matter what did or did not happen on the mountain to cause the tragedy, Jack was Clifford’s only witness who actually spoke his truth. George, Chap, and Cromwell all skirted the issue and swallowed their anger and blame, evidently to protect Fritz, and possibly themselves, from a lawsuit. In writing his thoughts on the tragedy to George Trench, Clifford got as close to a reasonable explanation of what happened high on the mountain as anyone ever would: “It might have been that Wiessner came down the mountain for help [with Dudley] rather than to look for further supplies.”

In the end, Clifford walked away dissatisfied from his months-long investigation. While he entirely blamed Fritz for the gross negligence that had led to Dudley’s abandonment and death, he was without recourse, learning the hard way that Himalayan expeditions are lawless societies because they are totally without objective witnesses. Neither the men nor the altitude allow for rational, clear thought, to say nothing of memory failings weeks and months after the fact. Unless someone is found with a smoking gun or a dripping knife, there are no rules, and while someone’s reputation may suffer, no one is ultimately accountable. The only bottom line is the loss of life, but even that is often shrouded in mystery, shame, and, always, a lot of blame.

After the immediate crisis passed, the American Alpine Club had hoped the matter would fade away, but once the conflicting and accusatory reports started coming out of Srinagar from Groth, Wiessner, and Cromwell, and then with Clifford Smith gathering legal testimonies, they realized they too had better pay it some official attention. In late December the club formed its own committee of inquiry into the “K2 matter.” They enlisted five club stalwarts, including two of Fritz’s would-be teammates, Bestor Robinson and Bill House, who reported that the committee gathered fat folders of oral and written reports from each expedition member. Oddly, both Jack Durrance and Fritz Wiessner later told interviewers they had never been contacted by the committee. The committee also gathered information from the 1938 teammates and several club members who had climbed with Fritz and could attest to his personal character. Chief among them was Charlie Houston, who, upon hearing of his “dear friend” Kikuli’s death and of Fritz’s comment about “expecting casualties” on expeditions, immediately and for the rest of his life blamed Fritz personally for the deaths. Houston’s implacable censure cast a pall over the club and began dividing it into factions, pro-and anti-Fritz. The fact that the country was on the verge of entering its second world war against Germany was never far from anyone’s mind and it didn’t help that rumors persisted that Wiessner was a Nazi spy. Furthermore, the club was critically aware of Clifford’s looming threat of a wrongful death lawsuit and did everything in its power to avoid naming names or finding fault. Instead, their eight-page final analysis, much like Fritz’s original report written in Srinagar, detailed the team’s progress up and down the mountain rather than analyzing why it lost four of its members. Citing Dudley’s illness at Camp VII as his reason for not descending, the report points no fingers of blame or recrimination; rather, it opaquely suggests that a “weak administration” led to a failure in communication so that those at base were unaware of the peril of the summit team above. Years later, Bill House revealed that the committee focused on two causes for the tragedy: first, that Wiessner continued his assault on the mountain even after the team was critically weakened by the loss of Chap, George, and Jack as climbing members, and second, that it considered Jack’s stripping of the camps inconceivable and devastating to the safety of the members above him. However, they decided to “back off” publicly blaming Durrance because they considered him to have been mentally compromised by the altitude and not totally responsible for his actions. Above all else, the committee and the club wanted to avoid any dissent which the investigation and growing controversy could start.

Remarkably, in the midst of the club’s investigation of what at least one of the team members was calling a murder, the club saw fit to charge the so-called “murdered” man’s family his unpaid $15 membership dues for 1939. Clifford Smith once again wrote a check.

Even as “whitewashed” as some club members later claimed the report to be, Fritz immediately filed an objection, writing a sheaf of letters to the committee members, his friends in the club, and renowned climbers all over the world arguing his case—that Dudley was
not
ill when Fritz left him, that he in fact had “insisted” on staying on the mountain for another try at the summit, that Fritz’s leadership of the team had been strong, clear, and direct, and that the team failed because the camps had been stripped.

While he previously had been content to place the blame on Tendrup for “fabricating” the story of the summit team’s death and taking it upon himself to strip the upper camps, Fritz evidently now decided to take Tony’s tack and began blaming Jack for what he called the most egregious error of the entire expedition: the stripping and abandonment of the camps. Fritz even said he had found a note which Jack had left at Camp II stating his goal to clean the mountain of gear (a note which has never been found). What’s odd is that it was clearly and inarguably Tony Cromwell who gave the directive to clear the lower camps, not Jack. Why Fritz targeted Jack and not Tony for blame is unknown. But the blame stuck, mostly because Jack Durrance refused to defend himself in the wake of the attack; instead, he withdrew to the mountains of Colorado where he finished medical school, worked, and raised his family for sixty-three years.

On row after row of dusty shelves in a narrow file room at the American Alpine Club reminiscent of the last scene in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, boxes contain table assignments for the club’s annual dinners from the 1920s and 1930s and every letter sent or received by the club president at the time. Yet the entire K2 Committee of Inquiry investigation materials—scores of oral and written accounts, letters, interview notes, phone conversations, everything—are missing from the archives. The official eight-page report remains, but the documentation concerning how the committee reached those conclusions has been lost or destroyed.

I
N THE MONTHS
after the expedition, while Fritz repeatedly urged others to approach Clifford Smith to pay the expedition’s debt, he ignored his own oral agreement with Smith to settle his personal $1,300 debt to Dudley. Finally, in October 1940, Clifford sent Wiessner a letter asking for payment in full. While the money was insignificant to Clifford, he couldn’t let Fritz just walk away, neither from Dudley on the mountain nor from his financial debt. Collecting it, however, wouldn’t be easy.

After several more months of delays, Fritz sent his first $50 in July 1941. Further months passed with no payments. In responding to Smith’s reminders, Wiessner bemoaned his failing business and the poor financial climate, yet at the same time he was writing to Roger Whitney that he would be able to pay his stockholders dividends because of his “very heavy” season. Ironically, given Fritz’s ugly speculation that Jack had wanted to have the sleeping bags from the high camps so he could “use them with women,” it was Fritz who ended up selling the expedition’s bags to those who inquired, one of them to a Miss Selma Jones.

With each of the few sporadic payments he made, Fritz asked Clifford for Dudley’s original films and photos, particularly those taken on the mountain.
^*
Incredibly, given his growing hatred of the man, Clifford gave him copies of the negatives and film footage.

In March 1942, the two met in New York, where Fritz asked Clifford if he could settle his remaining $950 bill for just $300, arguing that he had been delayed at great expense for several weeks getting out of India and that Clifford should take that into account. Clifford couldn’t quite believe his ears. Hadn’t Wiessner’s lack of judgment led to Dudley’s being left on the mountain in the first place? But after consulting with Gwen, who also wanted to be rid of “this Wiessner person,” the family agreed to settle the remaining debt for $500. Another six months later, Fritz paid the estate $250. It was the last payment Clifford Smith received. In two years of monthly letters and reminders from Clifford, Fritz ultimately paid less than half of the $1,300 he owed Dudley.

At the same time Fritz was bemoaning his penury to Clifford, he was actually becoming financially successful for the first time in his life. He was working for the large firm Ultra Chemical—one contract with Sears, Roebuck and Company was reportedly worth $1 million (or $15 million today)—and, in 1942, his ski wax business received an enormous order from the US Army: 600,000 tubes for its 87th Mountain Infantry Battalion, which in 1944 became known as the 10th Mountain Division. Not only was the order huge but it was “rush,” enabling Fritz to charge the army even more. Fritz later told his biographers that although he was thrilled at the size of the order, he was “shocked” at its size and thought it typical of the wasteful US military because the battalion’s 30,000 troops would never be able to use that many tubes.
^*
That year he reported his combined income from the chemical firm and his wax business between $500 and $800 a month ($7,500–$12,000 today).

Unaware of Fritz’s windfall, and, thinking that he was trying in vain to get blood from a stone, Clifford ended his vendetta and walked away, hoping never to hear of Fritz Wiessner again.

In closing out Dudley’s estate and notifying his beneficiaries, Clifford received many letters of condolence, shock, and thanks. One, from Dudley’s Harvard classmate Albert Gould, expressed the emotions of many:

Dudley’s friend and sailing colleague John G. Alden wrote, “If there were others more like him, the world would be better off.”

T
HROUGH SETTLING
Dudley’s estate Clifford came to know his brother more deeply in death than he had in life, and learned of Dudley’s remarkable friendships and generosity. In his will, Dudley bequeathed $75,000 to endow a new wing at the Knox County Hospital, $150,000 to Bowdoin College to establish a Smith Fund in his grandfather and great-uncles’ names, $25,000 to Harvard, $100,000 and his sloop, the
Highland Light
, to the US Naval Academy, even $25,000 to the Old Sailors’ Home in Boston. He also remembered his favorite mountain guides and sea captains, a handful of college buddies, his secretary Henry Meyer, each of his three nephews, and finally his Wolf cousins in London. In the end, even with his share of B. F. Smith’s trust left untouched, he gave away most of his personal estate, close to $500,000 ($7.5 million today).

Y
EARS LATER,
in 1983, Wiessner sold Dudley’s expedition film footage—the same footage that Dudley had tried to protect forty-four years before—to National Geographic for $440. On the contract, Fritz Wiessner claimed he was the sole owner and rights holder of the film.
^*

After the firestorm finally died down, Fritz returned to his life: running his business, having his family, and climbing challenging rock walls well into his eighties. During the fifty years after the expedition he thought not of Dudley’s death and his own part in it but of his lost victory on the summit. While he would admit to his children and some of his climbing partners that he had been physically unable to get the incapacitated Dudley off the mountain, he nonetheless publicly continued to blame others in the disaster, and specifically Jack (but not Tony) for stripping the camps and breaking the lifeline. In 1953 he wrote, “I lost the summit (which was a setup for me) in 1939, through no mistake of mine but through the phantastic [sic] errors made by others…”

Dudley Wolfe standing on the glacier below Broad Peak, K2’s 8,000-meter neighbor, on the last day of the 330-mile march into base camp.
(Courtesy of the George C. Sheldon Family)

F
or over sixty years, the puzzle of why Fritz left Dudley and in what condition and why Wolfe and the Sherpas died on K2 developed into one of Himalayan climbing’s greatest mysteries. Did the Sherpas reach Dudley and then all four die on their descent? Did the Sherpas regain Camp VII only to find Dudley already dead? Or were the Sherpas killed by an avalanche before they regained Camp VII, leaving Dudley waiting hours, then days, until his body gave out?

While we will never know exactly how long Dudley survived, we know he most likely died alone in his tent, which was eventually brought down to the glacier by a massive avalanche and found sixty-three years later. Because Dudley’s skeletal remains were found lying in the debris of a canvas tent and scattered vintage climbing equipment, it is all but certain that he came down in the tent. Otherwise he and his equipment would have been long since separated by the wind, weather, scavenging birds and snow foxes which prowl the area, and the violent freezing, thawing, and churning movement of the glacier. We also know he refused or was unable to descend by the time the three Sherpas reached him. But given his love of solitude and the quiet joy he found in nature, both on the ocean and in the mountains, we can hope that he died at peace. He was where he wanted to be, and from high-altitude experts we know that he gently slipped into a coma as the last of his life forces slowly left his body.

When he finally made it off the mountain, days, weeks, maybe even years later, he was in his tent, surrounded not by the trappings of wealth but by the barest essentials—a Sherpa’s thin, filthy sleeping bag several sizes too small for his frame, a cooking pot, and a Primus stove rendered useless by his lack of matches and the strength to get it lit.

K2
REMAINED
unvisited for the next fourteen years, as war and then the turbulent partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 closed the area. The first team onto the mountain after 1939 was the third American expedition in 1953, once again led by Charlie Houston. When Houston reached 23,400 feet on the mountain, he found the ruins of the 1939 team’s Camp VI, where Tsering had waited in vain for two days for Kikuli, Kitar, and Phinsoo to return: two destroyed tents, sleeping bags rolled into one corner awaiting the three Sherpas who had gone to rescue Dudley, a stove, gasoline, and a small packet of Darjeeling tea wrapped in a handkerchief and tucked under the stove. Another of Houston’s 1953 expedition members, Bob Craig, found several letters and rolls of film Dudley had left at Camp V on his ascent. It’s unknown if those letters or film ever made it back to his family in Maine. The only remnants of Camp VII ever found were found at the base of the mountain in 2002.

D
UDLEY
W
OLFE’S
teammates descended from the mountain and came home to their lives and families, but each was marked by that tragic summer.

Jack Durrance never engaged in the dispute over the stripped camps. While Fritz first privately blamed Jack in letters and conversations with the American Alpine Club members and officers, it was not until 1956 that he did so publicly, in an account in
Appalachia
magazine (where his friend Miriam Underhill was the editor). While furious, Durrance never defended himself. And even though he didn’t consider himself responsible for the four deaths, he never said so because he “never felt anyone would listen” to him. It was only after Tony Cromwell’s death in 1987 and Fritz Wiessner’s in 1988 that Jack finally allowed his diary to be released, revealing for the first time that Tony had sent the order to him at Camp II to strip the low camps.

Why Fritz fingered Jack and not Tony, and why Jack accepted the blame, is unknown, but many have speculated that Tony’s wealth and standing in the American Alpine Club were the root causes.

Fritz’s dogged determination and lobbying of club officials to have his expedition report seen as the official one, as well as Jack’s absence from the debate, allowed the blame to rest squarely on Jack’s shoulders. While many observers continued to question Fritz’s abandonment of Dudley and his oppressive leadership style, his reputation as a gifted climber gathered him a growing fan base within the American Alpine Club, an admiration which persists to this day.

J
ACK STRUGGLED
with demons most of his life, ones that only became more pronounced after the expedition. His girlfriend, Maria, became engaged to another man while Jack was on K2. Heartbroken, he married his climbing buddy’s sister somewhat on the rebound, and it was a troubled marriage during which the cultivation of irises became his passion. Several months after his return, he went to see Charlie Houston and for two hours talked nonstop about the expedition. It was perhaps the only time he spoke at such length and detail about the trip. What Charlie remembered most about the evening was how tormented Jack appeared, sitting hunched over, talking hour after hour in a rambling monotone. Always a heavy drinker, after the expedition he became a functioning alcoholic, making it through medical school
^*
and able to maintain a practice, but barely. As a teaching physician at the University of Colorado in Denver, he frequently would take his medical students drinking on what he called the “Red Tour,” beginning with red beer at a college pub near the campus, then another at the Red Ram in nearby Georgetown, concluding with a call to their wives from the Red Onion in Aspen. He was a difficult, roving husband and a wildly eccentric father who nicknamed his five children Worm, Bird, Ant, Dee Dee, and Yum Yum, names that they maintain in their middle age. A lover of fast cars, he had a stable of them and well into his eighties he would boast that no one could beat him to the Eisenhower Tunnel, a particularly treacherous section of Interstate 70 west of Denver. When the family drove to Wyoming on vacations, a trip that normally took eight hours would take Jack only four because he drove 100 miles per hour the entire way, thrilling his children and terrifying his wife. Always hating confrontation of any kind, if the children in the back seat began to squabble, Jack would offer them money to stop fighting. He also had a rare Mercedes 300SL gull-wing. When the children were small he would drive them to school and because it had only two seats, the older children would sit on the pontoon fenders wearing goggles to protect their eyes as they navigated through the streets of Denver. He eventually totaled the car, as he did most of his cars. One daughter remembers him driving his Cadillac off the road at full speed to chase rabbits across a field. When he was sixty-five he had a particularly bad automobile accident involving a train and was threatened with forever losing both his driver’s and his medical licenses. He quit drinking cold turkey, but it did little to tame his acid tongue and biting wit. Even his closest relatives considered him a “crusty old soul,” and his relationship with his children was so complicated and fraught with emotion that none of them wanted to speak at his memorial service.

K2 haunted Jack Durrance, yet he deliberately surrounded himself with its ghosts. His inadequate ski boots, which caused him so much anxiety and pain on the expedition, were tacked to his kitchen wall until the day he died in 2003 of Alzheimer’s disease.

C
HAPPELL
C
RANMER,
always a quiet man, came home from the mountain and retreated inward, becoming a laconic country minister who never discussed the expedition with his family. In the years that followed, Jack and Chap remained close friends and their children grew up together. But more often than not, Jack would needle Chap about his and George Sheldon’s early quitting of base camp, because he had felt abandoned and left alone to deal with Wiessner, the rescue, and the mess that followed. As Jack’s harrying of Chap became painful for those who watched, the taciturn pastor would merely sit there, his face growing redder and redder, but he would never respond. Even the Durrance children, who witnessed many incidents of their father’s cruel goading of Chap, wondered if Chap didn’t secretly hate Jack. Perhaps Chap simply felt he had to take it because in fact he had abandoned his friend and the expedition just when Jack needed him most.

At some point in the years after he returned from the mountain, Chap wrote a telling yet cryptic postscript in his diary:

He hadn’t done so by the time he died in 2000, so his explanation and story died with him. On his memorial is written what his family called his motto: “Preach the gospel always. Use words where necessary.”

G
EORGE
S
HELDON,
a gifted writer and the team’s official chronicler, sold his expedition story to the
Saturday Evening Post
and was working for the
Kansas City Star
when he was drafted into the army during World War II, where he became an espionage expert. He never wrote professionally again. He too never discussed the trip with his children, but both his son and daughter felt a heavy darkness around him whenever the subject came up. He died of lung cancer at his home in Thetford, Vermont, in 1989. He was seventy-one years old.

O
LIVER
E
ATON
“Tony” Cromwell threatened to resign in protest from the American Alpine Club if it didn’t expel Fritz Wiessner for what Tony considered his near-criminal mistakes as the team’s leader. The club refused, so Cromwell resigned in 1940 and lived much of the rest of his life in Europe. Years after Cromwell’s death in 1987, when asked the whereabouts of the journal he had kept on K2, his grandson replied that “he probably burned it.” John E. Cromwell said his grandfather never spoke to him of the expedition, but he said that there was always a sense of “infamy” around his grandfather having decided it was time to “pull up stakes” and order the camps stripped. While Tony Cromwell never faced charges publicly, there remained in his family an impression of shame and possibly guilt for his part in the ill-fated expedition.

P
ASANG
L
AMA,
the only other witness to Fritz’s summit assault and the decision to leave Dudley at Camp VII, was also affected long after the expedition. While he had an obvious wealth of information that could have clarified the story, sadly, few asked him to tell his version. One who did, Sir Edmund Hillary, later remarked to Durrance, “I know more about your expedition to K2 than you do,” but the circumstances just then didn’t allow him to elaborate and Durrance never followed up.

In a rare interview with Kurt Maix, co-author of
The White Spider
with Heinrich Harrer, Pasang called Wiessner “completely crazy! He want we climb whole night. Climb, climb, climb, and he say ‘when dark we at summit.’ I never see someone climb like he. I no see nothing—it night. But Wiessner say ‘it very bright.’ Maybe he see with fingertips. I say ‘I go no further.’ Crazy. No one climb like he.” Maix noted that while Pasang’s words were said with real fear of Wiessner’s ruthless climbing ethic, they were also said with real admiration for Wiessner’s strength and talent. In 1982 and in failing health, Pasang wrote Fritz asking for financial help; Fritz sent him $100.

A
S FOR
Fritz Hannes Wiessner, the brilliant climber but bullheaded leader who had abandoned his last man on the mountain and then pointed a finger of blame at every other person on the team, he came home to a sea of criticism. Like Cromwell, he resigned from the American Alpine Club shortly after its report was released, but after an ardent campaign in 1966 by two club members he was reinstated as an honorary member.

While Wiessner was able to return from K2 and live a productive, active life into his late eighties (he died of a series of strokes in 1988), many closest to him felt he was forever obsessed, not by the tragedy but by his lost chance at the summit—how close he had gotten, and how if he had been given just one more chance, he could have made history. Ironically, given all that we now know about physical and mental deterioration at high altitude and Wiessner’s own account of his confusion and exhaustion, if he had found the crampons at Camps VIII or VII that he needed for another stab at the summit, the chances of his dying on descent would have been very high. The lost crampons and the stripping of the camps became his excuse to descend and to do so without the burden of an incapacitated Dudley Wolfe. That chain of events—so disappointing at the time—probably saved his life.

It’s doubtful that Wiessner ever had that thought, as he remained forever bitter about his lost summit bid. Of Dudley Wolfe, he almost never spoke again.