The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (28 page)

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Araceli Segarra of Spain, Hector Ponce de Leon and Armando Dattoli de la Vega of Mexico, and cameramen/climbers Jeff Rhoads and Jeff Cunningham of the United States.

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Observation by Betty Woolsey, who was in attendance.

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Again, an observation by Betty Woolsey in attendance.

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Although he remained childless in his marriage, Francis Smith sent $50 a month (roughly $1,120 today) to a woman, Imogene Tappan of Concord, New Hampshire, to support a girl he called his ward, Helen Tappan, from 1884 until 1905 when she turned twenty-one. There is no record to determine whether in fact Helen was his daughter, although such ongoing support suggests she was. Also, the fact that Francis kept the receipts as well as Helen’s written confirmation of the final payment, releasing him from further financial obligation, indicates he wanted an assurance against any future claims to the Smith estate which a child, even if illegitimate, might bring.

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Joseph’s brother was Nebraska state senator Howard Hammond Baldrige, his nephew was US Congressman Howard Malcolm Baldrige, and his grand-nephew was H. Malcolm Baldrige, secretary of commerce under George H. W. Bush.

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While commonly known as Andover Academy today, at the turn of the twentieth century the school was known as Phillips Academy at Andover, which remains its formal name.

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In 1901, B. F. had lost his only son, and Mabel her only sibling, Clifford Warren Smith, to a burst appendix. When he died, Clifford left a son, Clifford Warren Smith, Jr.

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Lucien Emmanuel Wolf was a prominent Jewish diplomat, foreign affairs expert, journalist, and historian. After the outbreak of the Russian pogroms in 1881, Wolf took a leading role in the effort to aid persecuted Jews in eastern Europe and began warning the allied leaders of an ugly anti-Semitism raging throughout Europe which, if left unchecked, would only spread. However, because of his anti-Russian efforts he was perceived as pro-German. After World War I he lost his standing as a diplomat and effectively ended his career in journalism.

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It’s not clear whether Mabel or B. F. knew the truth of Dudley Senior’s Jewish heritage, although it’s hard to imagine a man as savvy and successful as B. F. wouldn’t know. In a book B. F. commissioned about the Smith family in 1932, it says that Dudley Senior was “the son of a prominent wool merchant,” not a Jewish pipe-maker and tobacconist, who had spent much of his youth in India.

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“Boche,” a term of derision meaning “rascal” or “pig-headed,” was used to describe the German soldiers.

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The enlistment delay turned out to be providential for Dudley, as most of the legionnaires died in battle.

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Harvard in the 1920s was more lenient in its academic standards for applicants, and Dudley’s ability to pay cash for his education couldn’t have hurt his application process. In any case, he was in.

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The Owl Club would later claim Senator Edward Kennedy as a longstanding member, until political pressure forced the senator to resign in 2006 from the still all-male society.

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Kraus, an early proponent of using physical therapy and exercise rather than surgery to treat weak and wounded spines, went on to become President John F. Kennedy’s primary back specialist.

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As early as 1577, astronomers were measuring not only the distance of stars but the elevation of mountains, and by the time the British Trigonometric Society sent out its cartographers to the ends of the earth in the nineteenth century, the world’s highest peaks had been measured to within inches of their actual height.

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From the early Egyptians to present-day Tibetans and Nepalese come tales of spirits and monsters which live in and, some believe, protect the mountains as the seat, house, or throne of gods. To trespass on that sacred land, particularly the summit, is a fool’s endeavor. Nepal’s Kangchenjunga, the world’s third highest mountain, is considered by the Nepalese to be the most sacred of all the 8,000-meter peaks and for many years after climbers first reached the top, they respected that belief by not setting foot on the actual summit. However, many recent climbers have violated that respect and left their footprint, and their vainglorious keepsakes, on the true summit. Some believe that, as a result, Kangchenjunga remains one of the most difficult to ascend, and survive, of all the fourteen 8,000-meter giants.

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Correspondence between Henry Hall and Wiessner, December 1938.

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Germany’s 1934 attempt on Nanga Parbat is generally considered unparalleled for sheer agony; ten expedition members, including Willy Merkl, died of exposure and sickness. Only one other team has lost more lives in the long and deadly history of Himalayan climbing: Germany’s 1937 attempt on Nanga Parbat, in which no fewer than fifteen members and Sherpas died in a single avalanche. Small wonder Nanga Parbat is known as the Man-Eater in many climbing circles.

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The only expedition in American climbing history which carries more respect and admiration than the 1938 trip is Houston’s 1953 return to K2, where, trying to rescue a fallen comrade from high on the mountain, he and the rest of his team survived a freak fall and in the process defined for many what the true “fellowship of the rope” is.

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Petzoldt stayed on in India after the expedition, having become enamored with Eastern religion, as well as a fetching American missionary’s wife. In a still mysterious accident, Petzoldt and the missionary were arguing when the missionary fell, hit his head, and died. Petzoldt made a frantic appeal to Houston back in New York for money to buy his way out of jail, which Houston sent.

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Here Dudley fudged a bit, as the invitation was proffered back in New York the previous fall.

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$37,500 today. Expeditions in the early twenty-first century to K2 cost each climber less than half of that, or approximately $15,000. But in 1939 it took months versus weeks to get there.

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Fritz had given Dudley a list of team members whose experience and maturity boded well for the expedition. Unfortunately, none of those men ended up going on the trip.

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House filled out a questionnaire for a biography on Wiessner in the 1980s. That biography was never written.

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Letter from Fritz Wiessner to Henry Hall at the American Alpine Club, December 28, 1938.

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Letter from Fritz Wiessner to Henry Hall, December 28,1938.

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$1,500 was evidently considered the rock-bottom amount required to get Durrance onto the expedition.

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$19,509 today. It’s no wonder Dudley was getting nervous.

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George never saw Susie again, but years later when his only daughter, Susan, learned of Susie’s existence, she wondered if her father’s long-ago shipboard romance had been the source of her name.

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The team called Fritz “Baby Face”—a term of endearment—because of his round, youthful features. He became known as Bara Sahib among the porters.

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Small breakfast, usually tea and fruit.

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Tony Cromwell, approaching his forty-seventh birthday in September, was the eldest member of the expedition and became “Pop Sahib” to the porters, Sherpas, and fellow teammates alike.

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For all of his good intentions and effort, when they arrived at base camp in 1938, Houston found the canisters were empty. Whether old or merely defective, they were nonetheless useless.

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Part of the Sherpas’ compensation was a climbing package of boots, sleeping bag, and steel-frame pack. Although each piece of gear was a cheaper version of what the sahibs had, it was more and better than they could afford. They valued their gear as much as the rupees they would receive at the end of the expedition.

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A practice in which a woman is married to several men at the same time, polyandry occurs when a woman marries the eldest son in a family and automatically becomes the wife of all of his brothers.

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Literally, “peace,”
salaam
is the Arabic and Urdu version of “Have a good day.”

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The Zoji is one of the oldest passes of the fabled Silk Road which connected Kashmir, Ladakh, Baltistan, Tibet, and the Kashgar region of central Asia.

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“Glory to the Heights!” In short order the German salutation became the expedition’s unofficial slogan, with the men using it to close many of their letters home as well as notes to each other on the mountain.

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After two expeditions to K2 and chronicling countless examples of bad base camp behavior from high-altitude climbers, the author has developed a theory. When the body detects even the slightest reduction in sufficient oxygen, the brain starts pumping a flood of different hormones, among them estrogen, one of the strongest life-sustaining hormones. That much is fact. Now, here comes the theory: Every woman has at least a small amount of testosterone and every man has a small amount of estrogen. Therefore, when men go to high altitudes perhaps they endure their first onset of estrogen-induced emotionality, or PMS. While the theory is entirely the author’s, medical and high-altitude experts became fascinated with the hypothesis and NASA is taking it into consideration as it designs the SpaceLab for extended exploration through the solar system.

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$1,500 today.

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Crowley would be one of the first high-altitude explorers to properly identify cerebral edema as one of the maladies afflicting climbers above 20,000 feet.

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While it is often thought that the mountains of northern India (now Pakistan) are too far from the Indian Ocean to suffer monsoon-like amounts of moisture, for over one hundred years expeditions have reported storms of seven to ten days with snow totals measured in feet, not inches. In short, monsoon weather.

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Jack Durrance, diary entry, June 19, 1939.

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Years later, Chap would be diagnosed with celiac sprue, a genetic disorder that sets off an autoimmune response when certain types of gluten are eaten, resulting in damage to the small intestine. This, in turn, causes the small intestine to lose its ability to absorb the nutrients found in food, leading to malnutrition and a variety of other complications. Given the wheat-heavy diet on the expedition, Chap would continually fight sickness. As a result of his chronic malnutrition, both before and on the expedition, at five feet nine inches Chap’s weight fluctuated from a high of 140 down to a low of 110 pounds.

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George Sheldon, diary entry, June 3, 1939.

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Houston later diagnosed Petzoldt’s illness as the mosquito-borne dengue fever.

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On approach march, their ninth Sherpa, Pemba Kitar, had taken ill with pneumonia and was sent back to Skardu to recover and return with a doctor’s note assuring that he was fit for work. He returned on June 28, but he was still weak and without a note. He left for good two days later. The team was therefore down to eight climbing Sherpas.

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It was this serac that broke off in great chunks in 2008, killing eleven climbers who were swept off the route in a series of ice and rock avalanches.

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While an Italian team became the first to summit K2 in 1954, they did so with supplemental oxygen. It wouldn’t be until 1978 that two American climbers made the summit without it.

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From Fritz Wiessner’s notes for his biography.

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Fritz wrote in his diary that he expected to find crampons in Camp VIII. However, when Charlie Houston was asked whether the high camps typically would be provisioned with extra crampons, he responded, “Unlikely. We didn’t have extra crampons in those days. Every man had his one pair and that was it.” Therefore, it seems that Fritz was counting on taking another climber’s crampons for his summit bid, leaving the man to descend the mountain without them.

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Fritz Wiessner, diary entry, July 22, 1939.

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Letter from Lt. George “Joe” Trench to Clifford Smith, May 16, 1940.

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It is unclear exactly when Wiessner entered the events into his diary. Trench mentioned he didn’t keep a daily journal and Chap Cranmer commented in his diary that “Fritz didn’t keep a journal so he wasn’t clear on what happened what days.”

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By the time Wiessner submitted his final draft to the American Alpine Club, he had inserted a brief mention of a “fall above Camp VII” but gave no details of how or when it occurred.

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Wiessner kept a log of the movement of the team and its gear on the mountain, but several of the expedition members noted that he didn’t keep a diary while on the mountain. The diary he submitted for later perusal was a small flip-style notebook of the same type as his gear logs, with pages ripped out, lost or destroyed, and the dates penciled in. It’s impossible to determine if the journal was written at the time of the expedition or later.