K2 (43 page)

Diemberger was indisputably a world-class mountaineer, but he was also fifty-four years old. I suspect that he and Tullis wanted the summit too badly, and that the “endless knot” of their interwoven partnership, combined with hypoxia, goaded them into making the foolish decision to push on. In their situation, no matter how much I might have craved the summit, if it was after 4:00
P.M
. I would have given it up and descended.

My own turnaround time is an inflexible 2:00
P.M
. I’ve never violated that deadline. And I’ve never had to stop and turn back because it got too late. It’s all about planning beforehand and starting early enough in the day. Too many times I’ve seen climbers invite trouble just by leaving for the top too late in the morning.

Diemberger and Tullis reached the summit at 5:30
P.M
. In
The Endless Knot
, he recalls that triumph:

This sounds like the perfect recipe for an unfolding disaster. But the most extraordinary thing about the summit push on August 4, 1986, is that all seven climbers made it back to Camp IV in one piece. On his way down from the top, Rouse found Mrufka still inching her way painfully upward. After a heated argument, he persuaded her to turn around and
descend. At Camp IV, Willi Bauer said later, “She cried in her tent because she hadn’t made it to the top…. I told her, ‘Mrufka, be happy that we’re alive.’”

Diemberger and Tullis did not leave the summit until after 6:00
P.M.
By then, the weather was deteriorating. All the way down, Tullis was near collapse. Diemberger went first on the rope to find the route. Suddenly he heard her call out his name: she had fallen and was cartwheeling down the steep slope. Diemberger plunged his ax in, put his weight on the head, and almost stopped her fall before he was wrenched from his stance by the rope. The two fell several hundred feet, out of control, before miraculously sliding to a stop.

The only headlamp the pair carried had failed to work. In the dark, with a belay from his partner, feeling more than seeing his way, Diemberger climbed into a crevasse to scout it for a bivouac site, only to discover that he was standing on a fast-crumbling snow bridge. He screamed at Tullis to pull him out, but, much lighter than the heavyset Austrian, she could barely hold him in place. With a desperate effort, Diemberger clawed his way back to the surface with his ice ax.

The pair finally bivouacked in a hollow snow niche they excavated out of the slope, at 27,500 feet. Since they had left their rucksack anchored to a piton at the top of the traverse out of the Bottleneck, they did not even have the space blanket Diemberger had stuck in his pack as an emergency shelter. It was a blessing that the storm held off until morning, but in the night both climbers suffered serious frostbite. At first light on August 5, in a whiteout, the two started down again, but they were effectively lost. Zigzagging back and forth, they finally struck the Korean fixed ropes and managed to get down the Bottleneck; in the mist, however, they could not locate Camp IV. Diemberger began shouting, and at last Bauer heard his cries and shouted back, guiding the two stricken climbers into camp.

Bauer later reported that he had dragged Tullis on her back the last stretch into camp, that “her nose and cheeks [were] quite black showing definite signs of first degree frostbite,” and that her gloveless “right hand
[was] swollen and bits of flesh [were] hanging down.” In
The Endless Knot
, Diemberger vehemently disputed these assertions, insisting that Tullis had made it into camp under her own power.

In any case, Bauer and Imitzer took Tullis into their tent, the largest of the three at Camp IV, fed her hot drinks, and tried to warm her with a spare down jacket. Eventually she returned to the tent she and Diemberger had pitched on the Shoulder on August 2.

Five of the seven climbers ensconced in Camp IV had reached the summit. To avert catastrophe, all they needed to do now was head down the mountain, following a route that was hung with fixed ropes most of the way. But the looming storm had finally arrived. The climbers stayed in their tents all through August 5. They would not try to descend, in fact, for another five days.

At base camp, Jim Curran and the other watchers could only guess what was happening high on the mountain, for there was no radio in Camp IV. In the storm, it would not be possible to climb up the Abruzzi Ridge to attempt a rescue, and as day succeeded day, the thoughts of those below turned dark. On August 5 and 7, there were lulls in the storm. On the latter day, Curran could see all the way up to the Shoulder. He said to the others in base camp, “If anyone is up, they will be, I imagine, hot-footing it down.” But no one arrived that day, or the next, or the next.

What happened at Camp IV from August 5 to 10 is still something of a mystery. Al Rouse, who had been the strongest of all seven climbers on summit day, had repeatedly vowed that one must spend as few days as possible at 26,000 feet. It seems that a kind of apathy took hold, the inevitable concomitant of the hypoxic states that perhaps all seven had entered on August 4; and that apathy most likely was reinforced by the complete exhaustion of Tullis and Diemberger.

On the night of August 5, winds that Diemberger estimated at sixty miles an hour piled heavy drifts of snow against the walls of the tent he shared with Tullis, threatening to break the poles. The Austrian was incapable of punching his way loose from inside, and by now Tullis was
snowblind as well as shivering with cold. In the morning, the two called out for help. First Rouse, then Bauer tried to dig the tent loose from outside, before giving up in the blizzard. Their furious ice ax blows tore holes in the tent fabric, however, forcing Tullis and Diemberger to abandon their shelter.

Dashing through the storm, Tullis tumbled into the Austrian tent, while Diemberger crawled inside Rouse’s. The man who had refused to share his tent with the refugees on August 2 and 3 now had to beg, “Please, let me in!” Without hesitation, Rouse and Bauer granted the same mercy Diemberger had denied others. But now the misery of overcrowded quarters once again sapped the willpower of the seven. They spent another night without leaving their tents.

During the night, the storm eased up, and the climbers prepared to make their getaway in the morning. At first light, however, as Diemberger later wrote, “there was no visibility…. With only the one line of escape, the risk of getting lost in thick fog or cloud on the Shoulder was great.” So the climbers stayed put.

In my view, this is a crucial passage. It’s startling that in all the subsequent discussion of the 1986 disaster, no one brought up the question of willow wands. That was the first thing that leapt to my attention when I read
The Endless Knot
and
K2: Triumph and Tragedy
before my 1992 expedition. Had the climbers wanded the route between the top of the fixed ropes and Camp IV, they could have managed to get down on August 7, whiteout or no. But neither Curran nor Diemberger even mentions this oversight as contributing to the tragedy.

There’s a curious passage much earlier in Diemberger’s book, however, that illuminates the thinking of the “Europeans.” On the way up to the Shoulder on August 2, he remarks, “I notice that only one of the bamboo sticks the high-altitude porters have brought up bears a red pennant; the other marker flags have either been lost during the transport along the ridge or have not yet been fixed. No time to sort that out now.”

The porters, of course, were Pakistanis working for the Korean expedition. Why didn’t it occur to Diemberger and Tullis, or Rouse and
Mrufka, or the three Austrians to bring and plant their own willow wands? That’s porters’ work, Diemberger seems to imply. Even more curiously, on that crucial slope below the Shoulder, the Austrian comes across a cached bundle of wands but declines to pick them up. He recalls, “I look at the bundle thoughtfully: they’re no protection against avalanches, that’s for sure. To put them in now, so near to the end of our time here, seems pedantic, an over-scrupulous precaution.”

Of course willow wands are no protection against avalanches! That’s not what they’re for. When I first read that passage, I wondered how such an experienced mountaineer as Diemberger could have been so blasé about willow wands. Now I realize, as I said earlier, that’s it’s just not chic for Europeans to climb with those garden stakes sticking out of their packs. And the same goes for Brits: unlike Americans, they have little or no tradition of wanding routes in the great ranges to safeguard a descent in a storm.

Thus on August 7, the climbers at Camp IV decided against going down in the whiteout for fear of getting lost. It makes you want to weep with frustration: a string of willow wands below Camp IV could have saved lives.

On the morning of August 8, Diemberger awoke to hear Bauer’s voice over the wind. At first he could not make out the words. He called back for clarification.

“Kurt!” Bauer shouted. “Julie died last night.”

“It was like a hammer blow,” Diemberger later wrote. “Alan, at my side, tried to comfort me. I heard his words without grasping their meaning.”

Bauer carried Tullis’s body to the abandoned tent, cut a hole in the roof with his ax, and deposited the corpse inside it. As heartless as that may seem, it was obviously preferable to keeping a dead body in the cramped Austrian tent.

That same day, August 8, the stranded climbers ran out of stove fuel. They could no longer turn snow into pots of life-saving water. They tried
to scoop handfuls of snow and melt them in their mouths. Many a person dying of thirst in the cold has tried to do the same, but it’s a desperate remedy that doesn’t really work, because the loss of precious energy in melting the snow outweighs the minimal gain of liquid.

Meanwhile, Al Rouse, who had been the strongest of the seven, began to fade. Diemberger recalled,

The survivors knew better than to hope for rescue from below. But all through the day on August 9, they stayed in their tents, certain that they could not get down in the ongoing storm. Only the next morning, when they woke to blue sky (though the wind was still raging), did they rouse themselves to action.

Willi Bauer was the motivating force.
“Aussa! Aussa!”
he yelled at Wieser and Imitzer—colloquial German for “Out! Out!” In the other tent, Diemberger and Mrufka slowly put on their boots. They knew that Rouse was now beyond help, but, as Diemberger put it, “The prospect of leaving him here is a ghastly one.” Tottering around outside the tents, he noted, was “like having to learn to walk again.”

Diemberger paid a last visit to Tullis. He later wrote, “I cannot see her face. The tent is half caved-in, but has not collapsed. I move the sleeping bag sealing the opening, and put the down jacket over her feet…. For the last time, I touch her—then I leave her alone.”

By this point, the other four survivors had already started down, but almost at once, the catastrophe deepened. Wieser and Imitzer were able to walk only a little more than 300 feet before they fell down in the snow. Mrufka and Bauer desperately tried to get them back on their feet, but had to give up.

Only minutes later, Diemberger came upon the doomed men.

To save himself, Diemberger, too, had to leave Imitzer and Wieser behind.

Throughout the early stages of the descent, Mrufka was stronger and faster than Diemberger, and the equal of Bauer. But all three were in a hallucinatory trance. When Diemberger finally caught up to the other two, Bauer suddenly asked, “Do you have anything to eat? Have you brought a stove?”

“No, of course not,” Diemberger answered in astonishment. It is a testimony to the sheer will to live that the three survivors were able to keep descending over tricky ground, on a route unsecured by fixed ropes. Their thoughts were fixated on Camp III at 24,100 feet, where they expected to find tents still standing, perhaps with food and stoves and fuel still in them. Late that afternoon they reached the camp, only to find to their horror that ice avalanches had destroyed everything.

The only blessing was that fixed ropes had been strung continuously from camp to the lower slopes of the Abruzzi. But here a trivial technical detail worked its cruel mischief. Neither Bauer nor Diemberger had a descending device, so each man simply clipped in to the fixed ropes with a carabiner and went down hand over hand. Mrufka, however, had a Sticht plate, which she insisted on affixing to each rope. A Sticht plate is a good belay tool, but for rappelling, it’s far less easy to use than a figure-eight device. At each anchor, Mrufka had to fiddle arduously with her plate to disengage it from the upper rope and attach it to the lower one. Diemberger tried to persuade her to use a carabiner instead, but Mrufka either refused or didn’t understand.

As they forged on down into the darkness, the two Austrians lost track of Mrufka. They assumed she was just behind them, but they would never see her again.

Trailing behind Bauer, Diemberger could barely hold on to the fixed ropes. He half-fell, half-slid down the cords strung along the nearly vertical fissure of House’s Chimney. But at Camp II, he found Bauer in a tent, melting snow over a stove. The two men drank as much as they could, then fell asleep.