K2 (35 page)

Slowly the climbers and the Hunzas got camps established and huge piles of gear ferried and winched up the route. And as the distance between them and base camp grew, the climbers allowed themselves various small acts of resistance to the iron mandates of their dictator down below.

This was not easy. Every day, Desio typed out—on an actual typewriter
hauled all the way to base camp—the orders for the day, then had them carried by the Hunzas or radioed up to the climbers. In 2003, when he was interviewed by an American journalist, Lino Lacedelli recalled one such command: “Order 13: ‘Who will not obey my orders will be punished with the heaviest weapon in the world—the press.’

“We called him ‘Il Capetto’ [the Little Chief],” Lacedelli reminisced. (Desio was shorter than all the climbers, some of whom stood no more than five foot five.)

In one critical respect, the 1954 Italian plan for K2 differed from those of all previous expeditions to the mountain: up high, the climbers intended to use bottled oxygen. Those bottles themselves would become a major cause of the enduring controversy.

Desio was such a control freak that long before the climbers got high on the mountain, he had decided on the precise movements to be carried out on the summit assault. The memorandum of instructions for that assault is also reprinted verbatim in
Ascent of K2
. A sample:

You cannot, of course, dictate these kinds of troop movements on an 8,000er. Everything depends on the weather, the snow conditions, and the relative strengths of different climbers, so up high you always have to be flexible and ready to improvise to meet the challenges thrown at you. Desio just didn’t seem to get this fundamental truth about mountaineering.

The oldest among the eleven climbers, at age forty, was Achille Compagnoni. A guide and ski instructor, he had a decent record as an alpinist
but was not the equal of several of his teammates, including Lacedelli and Bonatti. Nevertheless, early on Desio appointed Compagnoni as his climbing leader. This choice didn’t sit well with some of those teammates. Lacedelli wrote in 2006, in
K2: The Price of Conquest:

The mutual ass-kissing between Compagnoni and Desio leaves its traces in the pages of
Ascent
. Desio lavishes almost no praise on the other climbers in the team, but Compagnoni is “a man endowed with great strength of both body and mind,” of whom on more than one occasion the leader stands in admiration: “I had a long conversation that day with Compagnoni, and at the end of it I was left with the unshakable conviction that he was a man of iron will who would let nothing deflect him from his main purpose.”

Then, on June 21, with the team no higher than Camp IV at 21,500 feet, a sad event took place that could well have wrecked the expedition. Three days before, Mario Puchoz, a thirty-six-year-old guide from Courmayeur, had carried a load to Camp IV, but on returning to II complained of a throat infection. As his condition worsened, the expedition doctor put him on antibiotics and bottled oxygen. At 1:00
A.M
. on June 21, in Desio’s telling, “the sick man—who had appeared to be sleeping—suddenly passed away after a very brief agony.”

The doctor had diagnosed Puchoz’s condition as pneumonia, but I wonder if it wasn’t yet another case of pulmonary edema. In a difficult maneuver, several climbers managed to lower Puchoz’s body all the way
to the foot of the Abruzzi Ridge. He was then buried by his teammates “in a grave carved out of rock” near the cairn erected the year before in honor of Art Gilkey. Ever since, that cenotaph has been known as the Gilkey-Puchoz memorial.

There seems to have been no thought among the team members of canceling the expedition. But, as Lacedelli later wrote,

When a climber dies in the early stages of an expedition, the whole team has to decide whether to call it off and go home or to continue with the effort. In the latter case, the teammates always justify the decision with a phrase like the one Lacedelli used: “We must get to the summit for Mario.”

Desio’s rationale for forging onward was more grandiose: “It was our duty, then, to continue the ascent with renewed energy, that we might the sooner be able to inscribe on Puchoz’s grave-stone the date of the feat with which his name would be forever associated.”

I’m really fortunate in that I’ve never had to face that kind of decision. In fact, I’ve never lost a partner on a climb. In that situation, I don’t know what I’d do. It’s a complicated dilemma. If there’s a single determining factor in making that choice, it seems to be the size of the expedition. The larger it is, the more likely the members are to decide to go on with their campaign and climb the mountain in honor of their fallen comrade.

In 1963, the American Everest expedition lost Jake Breitenbach, one of their youngest and most skilled members, early on, when a serac collapsed in the Khumbu Icefall, crushing him beneath tons of ice. One of
the two teammates who was roped to Breitenbach and witnessed the collapse described the debris as “the size of two box cars, one atop the other.” It was obvious at once that there was no hope of even searching for the man’s body. Breitenbach had had one close buddy on the team, Barry Corbet, but he’d scarcely known most of the other climbers. That impersonality within a large expedition seems to allow the members to go through a mourning ritual, but then gird up their loins and head back into battle.

On the other hand, on Chris Bonington’s eight-man attempt on K2’s west ridge in 1978, Nick Estcourt was killed in an avalanche after the men had spent only twelve days on the mountain. Those guys were among the toughest and most ambitious mountaineers of their day, but they were all good friends of Estcourt’s and had shared previous expeditions with him. After a futile search for his body, the survivors sat down to discuss what to do. They were divided right down the middle, but since only three climbers (including Bonington) wanted to go on, they all gave in to the wishes of the other four and called the expedition off.

Yet in 1952, on the French expedition to Fitz Roy in Patagonia, with a team as small and close-knit as Bonington’s, Jacques Poincenot was drowned on the approach march in a botched attempt to ford a dangerous river. Lionel Terray, one of the greatest expedition mountaineers in history, later wrote in his autobiography,
Conquistadors of the Useless
,

More than a month later, Terray and Guido Magnone made the first ascent of that beautiful pyramid of granite and ice. The team named a handsome nearby peak Aiguille Poincenot, in homage to their lost comrade.

As the Italians worked their way up the Abruzzi Ridge, they found a vast range of enthusiasm and usefulness among their Hunza high-altitude porters. Only five of the thirteen seemed fully up to the challenge of carrying loads above Camp III. Of the others, Lacedelli recalled, “With them you agreed one thing and then you didn’t see them again. You would go back down and discover that they were still in the tent sleeping. It would drive you mad.”

Desio, too, complained about these slackers: “The language difficulty, the indiscipline of the Hunzas and the capriciousness of certain among them … frequently led to misunderstandings which it was not always easy to clear up.” Disciplinarian to the end, Desio eventually ordered “the dismissal of three men and the return of the five delinquents to their posts on the Abruzzi Ridge.”

Fifty-five years later, it’s hard to guess what was going on with the Hunzas. The language barrier must indeed have played its nefarious part. Since the Karakoram region had for so long been part of British India, some of the Hunzas spoke a smattering of English. But they certainly didn’t speak any Italian. Desio could probably get by in English, but mountain guides such as Compagnoni, Lacedelli, and Bonatti, who had never traveled far from northern Italy, didn’t comprehend a word of that language.

It may be fortunate that the less courageous Hunzas were scared out of their minds on the Abruzzi Ridge. Houston’s team had wisely decided that the Hunzas’ meager climbing skills made them a liability above Camp III. Desio, however, expected them to carry loads all the way up to the Shoulder at 26,000 feet. Hunza terror on steep terrain may well have looked to the Italians like mere laziness. It’s also possible that these high-altitude porters bridled every bit as much as Lacedelli and his disaffected teammates did under Desio’s stern dictatorship.

One incident barely mentioned in Desio’s text reveals the true courage some of the Hunzas were capable of. On July 6, one of the climbers, Cirillo Floreanini, started to descend from Camp III. For security, he held on to a fixed rope left from the American expedition the year before, but
he had no sooner put his weight on the rope than the anchor popped loose. Before the horrified eyes of his teammates, Floreanini rolled and then bounced 800 feet before stopping on a narrow ledge. Lacedelli ran to his aid. Writes Desio, “Bruised and bleeding, he was then hoisted on to the shoulders of a Hunza, who, helped by his colleagues, carried him down to Camp II.”

I’ve participated in a number of rescues on the 8,000ers, but I sure as hell have never carried another climber on my shoulders down steep terrain! That’s an almost unimaginable feat. But Desio doesn’t even bother to mention the gutsy Hunza by name. Just one more job the men from Gilgit were expected to perform.

As they crept higher on the Abruzzi, the climbers’ frustration with Desio’s autocratic leadership mounted. Typically, Compagnoni would radio down to base camp after each day’s effort. He and Desio would discuss the day’s events; then the leader would dictate the next day’s orders over the radio. Compagnoni relayed the command to his teammates.

A minor mutiny eventually erupted. As Lacedelli remembers it,

No one worked harder on the mountain than Walter Bonatti. And no one cared more about getting to the summit than he. But as the youngest member of the team, he knew it was unlikely that Compagnoni or Desio would choose him for a summit attempt. Throughout the expedition, moreover, relations between Bonatti and Compagnoni were cool at best.

Despite the tensions between the climbers high on the Abruzzi and their leader typing out orders from base camp, a chain of well-stocked camps crept up the mountain. Logistical overkill can work on a mountain,
in the simple sense of getting men and gear and food in place. The Italians were skilled climbers, technically perhaps a bit better than the Americans of the previous year. (Most of the Italians worked at least parttime as professional guides in the Alps, which gave them a steady climbing regimen. The Americans all had jobs or graduate school programs, from which they could escape only on weekends and holidays to hone their mountain craft.) And two of the Hunzas, Mahdi and Isakhan, performed as well at altitude as the Italians.

On July 18, four men, including Bonatti, first reached the Shoulder, where they chose a site for Camp VIII. It was not until ten days later, however, that that camp was installed. At 25,300 feet, it stood only 200 feet lower than the Americans’ Camp VIII of the year before, where Art Gilkey had collapsed with thrombophlebitis.

So in a few days the stage was set for what ought to have been one of the proudest accomplishments in twentieth-century exploration. Instead, what developed high on K2 during the following days would turn into a feud so sordid, bitter, and long-lasting that it has few parallels in mountaineering history.

On July 28, Desio made radio contact with the climbers at Camp VII. But then, during the critical days that followed, the leader at base camp lost touch completely with the high camps. The Little Chief was vexed.

To no avail. Just what sort of intervention Desio planned if he did make contact, only he would have known.

Fifty-two years later, Lacedelli would shed light on the radio silence: