K2 (31 page)

Worse luck could hardly have struck the team. Thrombophlebitis is so
rare among climbers, I’ve never seen a case of it on any of my thirty expeditions to 8,000ers. But since Gilkey, we all know that the threat exists. Long periods of inactivity when you’re stormbound in a tent can cause the blood in your legs to clot. And at altitude, the inevitable dehydration thickens your blood. It’s common practice nowadays on 8,000ers to take an aspirin a day to keep your blood thin and, when you’re stuck in a tent during a long storm, to periodically get your legs moving to improve circulation. Houston’s teammates wanted to believe that Gilkey might simply be out of action for a few days. Bob Bates asked his best friend, “How soon will he get better, Charlie?” Unwilling to burden them with his darkest thoughts, Houston gave them a guesstimate of ten days. Then he crawled back into Gilkey’s tent. He later wrote, “I did the best I could to explain his condition, leaving out the complications, taking as optimistic a note as I could, trying to hide my awful certainty that he would never reach Base Camp alive.”

Within the team, Schoening, Molenaar, and Craig had the most experience in mountain rescue, so Houston conferred with them about the chances of getting Gilkey down the mountain. The men answered that they thought they could manage such an extreme task, but, as Houston wrote, “Their statements lacked conviction.” And:

In his diary, Dee wrote a laconic assessment: “Situation looks desperate.” As if to mock the team’s ambitions, that very afternoon the sky in the west started clearing.

Hopeless the rescue might be, but, in Houston’s words, “We could try, and we must.” Gilkey was placed in a sleeping bag, which was wrapped in a tent, and a climbing rope was tied to his waist. The first effort, however,
was a complete failure. The days of storm had loaded the slopes below camp until they were on the verge of avalanching. The lowering was inviting disaster. The men hauled Gilkey only a few hundreds yards before they gave up.

There was nothing to do but return to camp. That took an all-out effort. The snow was too soft and deep for the men to haul Gilkey uphill, so he had to aid the effort by making what Houston called “great leaps with his good leg.”

The next day no one could move, as high winds tore at the tents, despite the slowly clearing sky. Gilkey’s condition seemed to improve slightly. “I’ll be climbing again tomorrow,” he told Houston, who knew that this brave promise could never be fulfilled.

By this point, the strongest climbers were Pete Schoening and Bob Craig. On that day, August 8, Craig made a bold proposal. “Charlie,” he said, “what about a dash for the summit from here?”

“Or maybe we could move two men up to IX today,” Schoening added. “I’m game. We might as well do something while we wait for Art’s leg to get better.”

If Houston was miffed by his teammates’ hunger for the summit, he never said so in print. And he gave them his blessing to head upward onto the Shoulder. In the deep snow, Schoening and Craig managed only some 400 vertical feet before turning back. Dee estimated their high point at 25,800 feet. Thanks to Gilkey’s collapse, the 1953 team failed by some 200 vertical feet to match the altitude reached by Houston and Petzoldt in 1938—and by 1,700 feet the high point Wiessner and Pasang Lama had attained in 1939.

On August 9, the storm returned in full force. And that morning, to his dismay, having listened to Gilkey’s “dry, hacking cough” through the night, Houston examined his patient and determined that the blood clots had indeed migrated to his lungs. Gilkey had a pulmonary embolism. Houston later wrote in
K2: The Savage Mountain
,

Dee’s diary entry for August 9 is equally poignant and honest:

Gilkey’s courage through this ordeal was extraordinary. He told Houston that while he felt no pain, the nonstop coughing was a “nuisance.” Houston recalled, “Art said nothing of himself. He had never talked about his death, though he was too wise not to see its imminence. He apologized for being a burden upon us. He encouraged us, spoke of another summit attempt—after we got him down.”

The storm raged on on August 10, but Houston demanded that the men begin the rescue effort that day. “What? Move in this storm?” someone said.

“We’ve got to,” Houston answered. “He’ll soon be dead if we don’t get him down.”

On August 7, after the abortive first attempt to evacuate Gilkey, Schoening, and Craig had gone back out to scout for an alternative route down, one that might avoid the avalanche-prone slopes of the team’s ascent route. They returned with the news that a steep rock rib just to the west might serve that purpose. It would take the team across much more difficult ground, but it looked to be safe from avalanches.

On August 10, the men packed up for what Bates would later describe as “the most dangerous day’s work of [each man’s] lifetime.” Gilkey was wrapped in a sleeping bag, with his feet in a rucksack. This makeshift litter
was cradled by a network of ropes. Four men, each tending a separate rope—one man above, one below, one on either side—would try to pull and steer the immobile victim down the dangerous ground.

At regular intervals, his teammates knelt close to Gilkey’s face to ask him how it was going. “I’m fine,” he answered each time, managing a wan smile. “Just fine.”

Schoening and Molenaar went ahead to scout the route—a perilous business, in the blinding storm. For able-bodied men to descend in such conditions would have been bad enough. With the burden of their helpless invalid, the team faced an almost impossible struggle. Bates remembered that day in
K2: The Savage Mountain:

After hours of grim effort, however, the men had lowered Gilkey to the edge of the rock rib, at about 24,500 feet. Meanwhile, Schoening and Molenaar had located the shallow platform in the steep slope that had served as a dubious Camp VII. Only an easterly traverse of a mere 450 feet separated Gilkey from that campsite. But to haul him horizontally across the icy slope loomed as the toughest maneuver yet.

Shortly before, Craig had been engulfed in a small windslab avalanche and had just managed to keep his purchase. Now he was so exhausted that he could barely tighten his crampon straps, so Molenaar belayed him over to the campsite. There Craig rested for a while before starting to enlarge the tent platforms with his ice ax. Molenaar returned to Gilkey and tied in with a short hank of rope to the invalid’s waist loop, hoping to help out in the delicate job of hauling the litter sideways across the slope.

The men were strung out across the dangerously steep terrain in atrocious
conditions. Coming last, Schoening had plunged his ax in to the hilt behind a small boulder, using it as an anchor as he looped the rope around the upper shaft and slowly fed it out to lower Gilkey. Bell and Streather were roped together on one rope, Houston and Bates on another. Molenaar stood beside Gilkey’s litter, tied in to it close.

As I’ve often commented, when climbers go to the rescue of someone else, that’s when they’re most likely to get in trouble themselves. They take risks they wouldn’t normally allow themselves, and urgency and adrenaline drive them to desperate efforts. On K2 in 1992, Scott and I got caught in the avalanche that nearly cost us our lives only because we thought we had to do everything we could to help Thor Kieser and the played-out Chantal Mauduit get down. We’d have never been in that place in those conditions if we had been simply climbing from Camp III to Camp IV. And the slope where we got avalanched was very close to where Gilkey dangled on the afternoon of August 10.

It took only a small misstep to trigger the whole chaotic accident. George Bell, who had lost all feeling in his feet, began downclimbing hard ice to aid in the maneuvering of Gilkey. He slipped, lost his balance, and started plummeting down the slope. The rope came tight to Streather and pulled him off his stance. Streather frantically tried to self-arrest but couldn’t get any purchase with the pick of his ax.

As the two men careened out of control down the mountain, their rope intersected with that linking Houston and Bates, pulling it tight. With no time to prepare, first Houston and then Bates were plucked off their feet. Four men were now hurtling toward what seemed certain death. Bates later wrote,
“This is it!
I thought as I landed heavily on my pack. There was nothing I could do now. We had done our best, but our best wasn’t good enough. This was the end…. Only thousands of feet of empty space separated us from the glacier below.”

The rope between Bell and Streather next snagged on the short tie-in between Molenaar and Gilkey, pulling Molenaar off his feet with a sudden jerk. Five men were now plunging in a tangled mess of ropes toward the 7,000-foot void. And two more were about to join them.

Dee Molenaar’s watercolor sketch of the complex accident of August 10, 1953, that nearly swept seven teammates to their deaths.

From 60 feet above Gilkey, Schoening saw what was happening. He threw himself on top of the ice ax he had jammed behind the small boulder and hung on to the rope with all his strength. The jolt came as Molenaar’s fall started to pull the helpless Gilkey down the slope. But Schoening held Gilkey in place, and the short tie-in stopped Molenaar’s fall.

Only the fact that the jolts came in a punctuated series kept seven men from being simultaneously swept to their deaths off the Abruzzi Ridge. Schoening held on, clinging to his rope with a death grip, and one by one, each of the falling men came to a halt. By the time the chain of events was over, Bell, the one who had fallen the farthest, lay 250 feet below Schoening. (
See diagram
.)

Pete Schoening’s “miracle belay” has become a legend. Nothing like it, before or since, has ever been performed in the mountains—one man with a single ax and a grip of steel stopping the otherwise fatal falls of six teammates and of himself. Schoening’s deed, which as a superbly trained climber he performed by instinct in a split-second reflex, is, simply, the most famous belay in mountaineering history.

The men were alive. But their predicament would now drain everyone’s last reserves.

Bell had lost his pack, his glasses, and his mittens in the fall. As he stumbled, half blind, up toward his teammates, he yelled, “My hands are freezing!” Bates and Molenaar had landed with one on top of the other, sprawled across a rocky outcrop. Before they could even guess what had happened, they heard a cry—probably from Schoening: “Get your weight off the rope!” Still holding his belay in that death grip, Schoening felt his hands starting to freeze, even with his mittens on.

Bates unroped, climbed down to Bell, and offered him a spare pair of loosely woven wool mitts that he had carried in his parka pocket. Bell’s fingers, already “an ugly fish-belly white,” were so stiff that he needed Bates to put the mitts on his hands.

The worst injured was Houston, whose head had struck a rock, knocking him unconscious. As Bates cautiously worked his way toward the “crumpled figure” below him, he was not sure whether his best friend was alive or dead. Bates touched Houston’s shoulder. Houston opened his eyes, then staggered to his feet. “Where are we?” he pleaded. “What are we doing here?”

No amount of explaining from Bates seemed to penetrate Houston’s fog. He kept saying, “Where are we?” He had suffered a bad concussion and lost his short-term memory. For the rest of his life, he would be unable to remember the accident. To motivate his friend, Bates brought his face close to Houston’s and ordered, “Charlie, if you ever want to see Dorcas and Penny [Houston’s wife and daughter] again, climb up there
right now!”

With a belay from Molenaar, relying on sheer muscle memory, Houston “fairly swarmed” up the rock-and-ice slope. But when he arrived at Molenaar’s side, he repeated, “What are we doing here?”