K2 (39 page)

John was the first guy I’d known personally who’d died in the Himalaya. (I didn’t know Alan Pennington.) Later I dug out pictures of the route and tried to figure out if I could learn anything from the catastrophe. But in the end, I had to admit that the death of the two climbers was the result of sheer bad luck. If ever there was a pure case of what we climbers call “objective danger,” it was that freak avalanche triggered by the boulder.

It’s true that on big mountains, the very lowest slopes can be among the most dangerous. In 1999 on Shishapangma, Alex Lowe, considered by many to be the best climber in the world, was killed with his partner Dave Bridges in a very similar accident, as they strolled out to reconnoiter a route they eventually hoped not only to climb but to ski down. An avalanche broke off thousands of feet above them. Lowe and Bridges tried to run for it, but were smothered by the debris. Their bodies, like Smolich’s, were never found.

But what can you learn from such grim accidents? If you want to climb an 8,000er, sooner or later you’re going to be kicking steps up an approach gully that just might avalanche.

Smolich and Pennington happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It
could
have happened to me.

None of the other ten teams on K2 in 1986 even considered giving up their attempts after the disaster on the Magic Line. But climbers who didn’t know the two victims gathered from many different parties to attend the impromptu funeral service on the glacier for Smolich and Pennington, and they were moved by it. John Barry, one of the best climbers on a British team attempting the unclimbed northwest ridge, later described the service in
K2: Savage Mountain, Savage Summer
. After Pennington’s body was lowered into a natural “sarcophagus,” Barry wrote,

Among the scores of climbers on different teams trying K2 in 1986, you could have assembled an international all-star cast. The Pole Jerzy Kukuczka was locked in a battle with Reinhold Messner to become the first man to reach the summit of all fourteen 8,000ers. K2 would be his eleventh such success, putting him only one peak behind Messner. The great Tyrolean mountaineer, however, aced out Kukuczka by knocking off his last two, Makalu and Lhotse, in the autumn of 1986.

It was hardly a match waged on a level playing field. By 1986, Messner was the most famous climber in Europe, perhaps in the world. He had multiple sponsors, received large fees for speaking engagements, and earned royalties from a string of books he’d written. Messner is without question one of the greatest high-altitude climbers of all time, as he demonstrated with breakthrough ascents on Everest in 1978 with Peter Habeler, without supplemental oxygen, and again on Everest solo and oxygenless two years later. But in the highly competitive circles of Himalayan aficionados, many observers pointed out that Messner usually chose the standard routes on the 8,000ers.

Kukuczka, like most Polish climbers, could barely afford each expedition he went on. But what was most admirable about his campaign on the 8,000ers—in 1987, he became the second person to claim all fourteen—was that he almost never opted for the easiest route. Ten of his ascents of the highest peaks were by new routes, and four came in winter—including the first winter ascent of Annapurna, an achievement that still awes me,
twenty-two years later. Sadly, Kukuczka died near the top of the unclimbed south face of Lhotse in 1989, when a rope broke. It’s a dreary testament to this great mountaineer’s continued poverty that the rope was a cheap six-millimeter cord he had picked up in a market in Kathmandu.

In 1986, Kukuczka was determined to climb a new route up the center of K2’s south face. And he intended to pull off this deed alpine-style, with but a single fellow Pole as his partner.

Clear on the other side of K2, climbing out of China rather than Pakistan, a very strong American team was attempting the north ridge. Its members also included several superstars, among them Alex Lowe, George Lowe (no relation to Alex), Dave Cheesmond, and Catherine Freer, considered the best American woman alpinist of her day. Despite having such experts along, the team had to turn back a little above 26,500 feet, defeated by storms and terrible snow conditions. As mentioned above, Alex Lowe would die on Shishapangma thirteen years later. And Cheesmond and Freer vanished in 1987, on an incredibly bold two-person alpine-style attempt on the Hummingbird Ridge of Mount Logan, in Canada. Speculation had it that their tent, pitched on a narrow curl of the relentlessly steep and twisting ridge, broke loose with a cornice that collapsed, sending them hurtling to the glacier thousands of feet below. Their bodies, like Lowe’s, were never found.

Another all-star on the mountain in 1986 was the Frenchman Benoît Chamoux. His project was to climb the Abruzzi faster than anyone ever had before. If you wonder just how dangerous trying to climb all the 8,000ers really is, you should contemplate the fates of Kukuczka and Chamoux. In 1995, the Frenchman would disappear near the summit of Kangchenjunga, which would have been his fourteenth and last 8,000er. The scuttlebutt had it that Chamoux wanted Kangchenjunga too badly, as he was running head-to-head with the Swiss mountaineer Erhard Loretan for the honor of being the third man to nail the whole list.

Yet another climbing celebrity was the Italian Renato Casarotto. His K2 plans were probably the most ambitious of anybody’s that summer. The Magic Line on the south face had repulsed a number of previous attempts. Casarotto wanted to make its first ascent
solo
.

At age fifty-four, the Austrian Kurt Diemberger was well past his prime, but by 1986 he was a mountaineering legend. Way back in 1957, he had paired with Hermann Buhl (the man who had made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat solo four years earlier) and two other Austrians to become the first climbers to reach the top of Broad Peak, the twelfth-highest mountain in the world. Theirs was an admirably lightweight assault, accomplished virtually alpine-style, that set a new standard among the 8,000ers. Only eighteen days after summitting on Broad Peak, however, as Diemberger and Buhl retreated from nearby Chogolisa in a gathering storm, a cornice broke loose, taking Buhl to his death. (Like those of so many victims in the Himalaya and the Karakoram, Buhl’s body has never been found.)

In 1960, Diemberger was a member of a combined Swiss-Austrian team that made the first ascent of Dhaulagiri, the world’s seventh-highest peak. He and Buhl remain eternally the only two climbers to make the first ascents of two different 8,000ers. In 1986, Diemberger joined a large team on K2 to serve chiefly as a filmmaker, but he wanted very much to reach the summit with the woman who had become his regular climbing partner, Julie Tullis from Great Britain.

The strong British team attempting the northwest ridge was led by Alan Rouse, among the elite of his country’s high-altitude mountaineers. That party had an additional incentive, for any members who got to the top would be the first Britishers to succeed on K2.

In 1975, the Japanese Junko Tabei had become the first woman to climb Mount Everest. By 1986, no woman had yet reached the top of K2. A number of women had tried, including the Americans Dianne Roberts, Cherie Bech, and Diana Jagersky in 1978. But no woman had yet even come close to summitting. (According to Rick Ridgeway’s
The Last Step
, much of the dissension among the 1978 team sprang from the conviction among some of the climbers—notably the blunt, outspoken John Roskelley—that Roberts had no business on the mountain, but was along simply because she was the wife of expedition leader Jim Whittaker.)

Two women on K2 in 1986 seemed capable of making the first female ascent. One was Liliane Barrard from France, who had previously
climbed Gasherbrum II and Nanga Parbat. The other was the Pole Wanda Rutkiewicz, widely regarded today as the finest high-altitude female climber of all time. Unable to afford an expedition of her own, Rutkiewicz joined Barrard’s team, launching a friendly rivalry over which woman would get to the summit first.

By 1992, Rutkiewicz had summitted on eight of the fourteen 8,000ers. Many in the climbing world assumed that she would eventually join the ranks of the very few men who had bagged all fourteen. But that May—how often the paths of such ambitious climbers lead to the same dismal outcome!—she disappeared near the summit of Kangchenjunga, just as Chamoux would three years later.

Many of the climbers involved in the “dangerous summer” of 1986 would later write about it, but only one produced a comprehensive narrative of all the confusing events that took place between June and August. Jim Curran had joined Alan Rouse’s northwest ridge expedition primarily as a cinematographer, but also to write a book, should the team succeed. Though not at the top level as a mountaineer, and with no ambitions to reach the summit, Curran was (and is) one of Britain’s finest mountaineering writers. In the end, instead of writing only about his own expedition, Curran attempted to cover the stories of all eleven teams on the mountain, in his deft 1987 chronicle
K2: Triumph and Tragedy
.

By the time the avalanche snuffed out the lives of Smolich and Pennington, Liliane Barrard’s team was high on the Abruzzi Ridge. The foursome was led by Maurice Barrard, Liliane’s husband and inseparable climbing partner. Along with Wanda Rutkiewicz, the party was rounded out by another strong Frenchman, Michel Parmentier.

Afterward, Rutkiewicz wrote a short account in Polish of her team’s adventure on the Abruzzi. (Translated into English, it is reprinted as an appendix in Curran’s book.) Rutkiewicz’s report is the only insider account of what happened to Barrard’s team.

In the spring of 1986 in Paris, Maurice Barrard had met with Kurt Diemberger to discuss the Abruzzi route. In
The Endless Knot
, Diemberger’s own account of K2, he quotes a statement by Barrard that, in view of what transpired on August 1, 2008, has an eerie prescience:

From the start of their climb, Rutkiewicz got along so poorly with Parmentier that she refused to share a tent with him, camping instead in a small two-man tent she borrowed from the British. Trying to climb fast and light through deep, soft snow, the team managed successive gains of only 650 and 1,300 vertical feet on June 21 and 22. Their last camp was at the remarkable altitude of 27,200 feet. Rutkiewicz does not identify the site except to call it “a small rock platform”—my guess is that it was on the ramp after the climb of the Bottleneck and the delicate leftward traverse. Rutkiewicz wrote, “We spent the night there … without sleeping bags in a very bad condition, all four squeezed into one small tent.”

The climbers had only just over 1,000 vertical feet to climb the next day to reach the summit, but on June 23 they gained ground at a snail’s pace. It may be that they were simply too early in the season, for the snow on the summit cap stayed relentlessly deep and soft. Barrard’s team was the first that year to reach the summit snowfield, so they had had no fixed ropes to rely on above about 24,000 feet, and no one had broken trail ahead of them.

The four climbers left their squalid camp at 7:30
A.M
. on June 23. Halfway to the summit, however, Maurice Barrard made what seemed to Rutkiewicz a very strange announcement: “Now we will rest here for a couple of hours and cook something.” Out of his pack he pulled a stove, a pot, and packets of instant soup.

That was indeed a bizarre decision. On summit day on an 8,000er, every minute counts. For liquid, you need to sip from a water bottle you’ve filled that morning or the night before, which you carry in a chest pocket
to keep the fluid from freezing. I can’t imagine sitting down at something like 27,800 feet on K2 to brew up soup!

Rutkiewicz felt the same way. “I didn’t want to stay such a long time there drinking soup,” she later wrote. “I was in a hurry. The summit was beckoning. So I left the others and started out on my own.”

The Pole reached the top at 10:15
A.M.
, becoming the first woman to climb K2. She wrote a little note, signing it with both her and Liliane’s names, and placed it in a plastic bag tucked into some rocks just below the summit. Given the frictions within the team, it’s surprising that Rutkiewicz didn’t immediately head down. Instead, she waited a long while for her teammates and then, after they arrived, shared an hour’s celebration with them on top.

The upshot was that the foursome did not regain their 27,200-foot camp until late afternoon. Rutkiewicz was of a mind to keep heading down, but Maurice Barrard urged that they spend the night in the single tent pitched on the rock platform, and she acquiesced. She would later write, “I was tired, but not exhausted. The weather was still good and I was not worried. But I should have been. One should remain at that altitude as short a time as possible. I didn’t know in the sunshine that death was following us down.”

To try to sleep, Rutkiewicz took two and a half Mogadon tablets. As recently as 1986, climbers routinely popped sleeping pills at high camps, but it was later discovered to be a very dangerous practice. Pills such as Valium and Mogadon continue to depress one’s pulse rate and other aspects of the cardiovascular system for twelve hours or more after waking, which isn’t a good thing for any athlete, much less a mountaineer at 27,000 feet. I never took sleeping pills up high, mainly because I wanted to be fully alert in case a storm blew in during the night or something else went wrong.