K2 (42 page)

The British team on the northwest ridge was coming apart at the seams. Besides the leader, Alan Rouse, the team was made up of some of the crème de la crème of British mountaineering: John Barry, John Porter, Brian Hall, and the infamous Burgess twins, Alan and Adrian—hippie iconoclasts who were nonetheless top-notch, quite conservative mountaineers.

As they attacked an unclimbed route on K2, with the prospect of becoming the first Brits to climb the mountain, the team was buoyed by promises of book and film contracts. In the middle of the expedition, the climbers got a letter from the wife of one of their Himalayan cronies back home, informing them that the word was out that the climbers would be knighted by the queen if they got to the top. This was apparently a spoof, but such an honor would not have been inconceivable. After all, John Hunt and Edmund Hillary had been knighted after the first ascent of Everest.

But the team never jelled on the mountain. Rouse divided his climbers into two foursomes, infelicitously calling them the “A Team” and the “B Team.” (He put the Burgess brothers on separate teams, even though they were used to climbing together.) And no one seemed happy with Rouse’s leadership, which was constantly vacillating and indecisive. In
K2: Triumph and Tragedy
, Jim Curran painted a basically sympathetic portrait of Rouse, to whom he was loyal to the end. But John Barry wrote his own book, called
K2: Savage Mountain, Savage Summer
, culled mainly from his own diary entries, which are scathing about Rouse:

Barry is as gleeful a tell-all narrator as Galen Rowell and Rick Ridgeway were in their K2 books. The diary entries paint a dreary picture of
constant bickering: “Big row. I tell Al-R [Rouse, to distinguish him from Al Burgess] that I think he’s a fool. Al goes off to tent in tears. Jim-C[urran] follows to comfort him. But still there is no apology or commitment to Wilkie. Wilkie pulls out.”

The biggest problem for the British expedition, however, was that despite repeated efforts, the climbers made little headway on the northwest ridge. The intricacies of the route, the misery of the snow conditions, and the danger posed by avalanche slopes and precarious seracs defeated these crack alpinists. The team reached an altitude of only 24,300 feet before giving up. The northwest ridge would finally be climbed in 1991 by a pair of dedicated French mountaineers, Pierre Béghin and Christophe Profit, but even their ascent line deviated onto the north face high on the mountain.

As early as July 7, Rouse’s party threw in the towel on the northwest ridge. In his diary, Barry laconically recorded:

By this early date, a number of Rouse’s teammates had suddenly remembered that they had job obligations back home. By ones and twos over the following weeks, they abandoned the expedition and started the long hike out. John Barry himself defected on July 28. As a result, his book is hugely anticlimactic, the long last chapter devoted to his humdrum hike back to civilization rather than to the drama that would soon unfold on the mountain.

In changing routes from the northwest ridge to the Abruzzi, Rouse was breaking all the rules, for his permit covered only the former route. As Barry wrote, “There’s great secrecy surrounding our switch to the Abruzzi. Al-R doesn’t wish to be banned from Pakistan for ten years; which he says is what the punishment would be. Phil [Burke] says that it would be a reward. I’m beyond caring.”

The Brits had sardonically nicknamed the mass base camp at the foot of the Abruzzi “the Strip.” Now, to get on the route themselves, the climbers still committed to the mountain transferred all their gear to a new base camp, as they sneaked past the Strip, hoping that the various liaison officers from other teams would not discover their transgression. The two narratives of the British expedition start to take on a comic tone at this point. The whole expedition, in fact, could have been treated as a comedy (this seems to have been John Barry’s intention from the start), had it not ended in the disaster of early August.

By the beginning of that month, among the Brits only Al Rouse was still fully committed to an attempt on K2. Jim Curran would linger on, but strictly in the role of chronicler, scarcely climbing above Camp I. And now Rouse completed his defection from his own team, as he announced that he was pairing up with a woman from the Polish team to climb the Abruzzi. Whether Rouse and Dobroslawa Wolf (known as Mrufka, Polish for “ant”) had started having an affair is pretty much irrelevant. What matters is that all semblance of teamwork—except the dogged loyalty of Curran at base camp—had vanished from the British expedition.

Kurt Diemberger and Julie Tullis had spent most of their time so far on K2 filmmaking for the Italian team to which they were attached. Calling themselves Quota 8000, those climbers had started work on the Magic Line, but after the deaths of Pennington and Smolich, they had bailed and switched over to the Abruzzi. Unlike the British, the Italians claimed they had obtained permits beforehand for both routes, though climbers from other teams were skeptical.

Diemberger and Tullis’s not-so-secret agenda was to climb K2, rather than simply make a film about their teammates. They were an odd pair, the subject of gossip all over the mountain. Tullis, at forty-seven, and Diemberger, at fifty-four, were both married—apparently happily—and Diemberger’s
The Endless Knot
unabashedly credits the help and goodwill of Terry Tullis and Teresa Diemberger. But when he writes about the bond between himself and Julie, passage after passage reverberates with an intimate passion. For example:

Or:

Granted, Diemberger has always been a writer inclined toward the mystical and the emotional. What matters is not whether Diemberger and Tullis were lovers (with or without the knowledge of their spouses) but whether the very emotionality of their relationship, like that newly formed between Rouse and Mrufka, interfered with good judgment on this dangerous mountain.

At first, Jim Curran took a slightly jaundiced view of the Tullis-Diemberger pairing. He had known Tullis for years, though not well, through encounters at climbing meets and festivals in Britain. She struck him as, on the one hand, “a bright, attractive, and apparently conventional housewife” and, on the other, as “a rather bossy ‘head girl.’” He was not at all sure Tullis was ready for K2, for “her actual mountaineering experience was rather limited and certainly had not got the foundation of Scottish winter and extreme alpine climbing,” which the best British alpinists considered mandatory before one tackled the most serious mountains.

Diemberger, whom Curran had also known casually over the years, “radiated a massive self-confidence, amounting at times to self-importance.” But at K2 base camp one day, as Diemberger reminisced about Broad Peak with Hermann Buhl in 1957, Curran was won over by the legend: “I was suddenly conscious that here was a major part of Himalayan climbing history in the flesh.”

The crux of Curran’s analysis of the bond between the British woman and the Austrian man was that Julie, “through her devotion, almost amounting to hero-worship, of Kurt, had come to see herself as a world-class mountaineer in her own right.” And that spelled trouble.

On K2 in 1992, despite my undeniable attraction to Chantal Mauduit, and even as I wondered whether she was flirting with me, I had no intention of getting involved with her during the expedition. My own concentration and commitment, I absolutely believed, depended on having no relationship with another climber that might undercut my motivation or cloud my judgment. All of my energy and focus needed to be on trying to climb K2. Anything less could spell failure or even disaster.

On August 2, Tullis and Diemberger, along with Rouse and Mrufka and three Koreans, all reached the Shoulder, at 26,000 feet. They had been preceded by three Austrians—Willi Bauer, Alfred Imitzer, and Hannes Wieser—who that day were attempting to go for the summit but had to turn back at 27,500 feet. This created a serious space problem at Camp IV, where only three tents stood, normally capable of housing seven climbers. When the Austrians returned late that afternoon, they pleaded to be allowed to jam in with the others, so that they could make one more try for the top. At last the Koreans generously accepted two of the Austrians, so that night five men slept piled together in a three-man tent. Rouse and Mrufka invited the third Austrian into their tent. But Diemberger refused to share his and Tullis’s tent, despite (or because of) the fact that the Austrians were his compatriots. (Afterward, there would be hard feelings between Diemberger and Bauer.)

On August 3, the Koreans set out for the summit. They reached it late in the afternoon and were overtaken by night on the descent. Two of the Koreans regained Camp IV, while the third survived a bivouac above the Bottleneck, having tied himself off to a piton. (That same night the three Poles who had made the first ascent of the Magic Line came down the Abruzzi, only to lose Wojciech Wróż in the darkness.)

Later, many would wonder why the “Europeans” (Brits are not, strictly speaking, Europeans)—Tullis and Diemberger, Rouse and Mrufka, and
the three Austrians—didn’t go for the summit with the Koreans on August 3, while the weather was still fine. The vague explanation offered by the survivors was that they needed a day of rest and wanted to avoid a traffic jam in the Bottleneck. Another factor may have been that, of all the teams on the mountain that summer, the Koreans were felt to be climbing in the poorest style. Using old-fashioned heavy logistics, their nineteen-man team had strung the route with fixed ropes up the Bottleneck and across the leftward traverse above it. On August 3, the three summiteers used bottled oxygen all the way, the only climbers that season to rely on gas. Yet the Koreans survived where others did not.

With the addition of the two Poles from the Magic Line, the tent situation at Camp IV on the night of August 3 became drastic. Showing remarkable magnanimity, Rouse let the Poles move in with him and Mrufka, even though that meant that he spent the night halfway out of the tent, his upper body nestled in a snow hole. The third Austrian moved into the Korean tent. Once again, Diemberger and Tullis refused to accommodate any of the refugees.

In
The Endless Knot
, though he acknowledges the overcrowding problem, Diemberger never explains why he and Tullis were unwilling to share their tent—in fact, he dances so cleverly around the truth that if you had only his account of the expedition to go by, you’d never uncover that selfishness.

It seems clear that the later debilitation of many of the climbers at Camp IV was partly a result of the miserable nights they spent in crowded tents on August 2 and 3. At 26,000 feet, it’s hard enough to sleep in “normal” quarters, let alone with too many climbers crammed into too small a tent.

On August 4, the seven “Europeans” set out for the top. Rouse and Mrufka were the first out of camp, but they departed only at dawn, not in the middle of the night, as Charley, Scott, and I would do six years later. Despite two nearly sleepless nights, Rouse was the strongest climber among the seven, and in fact he broke trail nearly all the way. Mrufka quickly fell behind. One of the Austrians, Hannes Wieser, turned back
a short way above Camp IV. Willi Bauer and Alfred Imitzer caught up with Rouse not far below the summit and took over the trail-breaking. They reached the top at 3:15
P.M.
, Rouse not long afterward. After two and a half months on the mountain, he had finally claimed the first British ascent of K2.

Tullis and Diemberger had actually set out from Camp IV before the Austrians, but they’d quickly been overtaken by Bauer and Imitzer. The weather was holding perfect. Diemberger’s account of the summit climb in
The Endless Knot
is so rich in mystical transport that you have to read between the lines to figure out what was going on with Tullis and himself. They climbed roped together, as no one else did, and they were very slow. Sensibly, they vowed not to reach the summit later than 4:00
P.M.,
but by 3:00
P.M
. they were still 650 vertical feet below the top.

Suddenly they came upon Mrufka, leaning immobile against the slope. To their shock, they saw that the Polish woman was asleep. Diemberger woke her up and offered her a candy. “She reacts with alarm, looking up full of surprise,” he later wrote. “‘No … Up … I have to go up!” As Diemberger and Tullis continued on, Mrufka put on a burst of speed and tried to pass them. Tullis suggested that she follow in their tracks, for she was clearly half out of her mind, but Mrufka blurted out, “I don’t want to climb behind an old man.”

For long moments, Mrufka flailed away clumsily on the steep slope above Diemberger and Tullis, who were terrified that she would fall and knock them off their feet, or snag their rope and pull them off. Eventually Mrufka passed out of sight to the right.

At 4:00
P.M.
, Bauer and Imitzer suddenly appeared, heading down. Diemberger recounted their conversation.

“Are you sure you still want to go up?” Bauer asked him.

“It shouldn’t take us more than an hour at most,” he replied.

“You’re wrong. It took us four hours!”

Diemberger could not believe what he was hearing. Finally he deduced that Bauer meant four hours from the top of the traverse out of the Bottleneck, not from their present position. (It sounds as though no one
was thinking very clearly that day high on K2.) Reassured by this rationalization, Diemberger and Tullis pushed on, violating their own turnaround deadline. But first Diemberger asked Bauer, “Are there any crevasses where you can bivouac?”