Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains Read online

Kukuczka was the heir apparent to Messner's unofficial title as the world's greatest high-altitude alpinist. When he arrived at the base of K2, Kukuczka was nipping at Messner's heels in the race to climb all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks; he had already bagged ten of them, an accomplishment that was especially impressive considering the expense of mounting Himalayan expeditions and the pathetic rate of exchange for Polish zlotys. To fund their expeditions, Kukuczka and his Polish comrades had been routinely forced to smuggle vodka, rugs, running shoes, and other unlikely commodities that could be bartered for hard currency.

  Just before sunset on July 8, after a lot of extreme technical climbing and four brutal bivouacs (the last two of which were without tent, sleeping bags, food, or water), Kukuczka and Pio- trowski struggled to the summit of K2 in a howling storm. They immediately began to descend the Abruzzi Spur. Two days later, totally strung out and still battling their way down through the blizzard unroped, Piotrowski-who, because of numb fingers, had been unable to properly tighten his crampon straps that morning -stepped on a patch of steel-hard ice and lost a crampon. He stumbled, righted himself, then lost the other crampon. An attempt to self-arrest wrenched his ice axe out of his hands, and he was soon hurtling down the steepening slope out of control. Kukuczka could do nothing but watch as his partner bounced off some rocks, then disappeared into the mists.

  By now the summer's death toll was beginning to give pause to most of the climbers still on the mountain, but for many the lure of the summit proved stronger. Kukuczka himself departed immediately for Nepal to attempt his twelfth 8,000-meter peak and gain ground on Messner in the race to knock off all fourteen. (The effort would prove to be in vain when Messner reached the summits of Makalu and Lhotse the following autumn, to claim the fourteensummit crown.)

  Shortly after Kukuczka returned to base camp to tell his troubling tale, the thirty-eight-year-old Italian solo climber Renatto Casarotto set out on his third attempt that summer to climb the Magic Line alone. This attempt, he had promised his wife, Goretta, would be his last. Solo ascents of difficult new routes on Fitzroy, Mt. McKinley, and other major peaks in South America and the Alps had given Casarotto a heroic, damn-the-torpedoes reputation, but the Italian was in fact a very cautious, very calculating climber. On July 16, a thousand feet below the summit and not liking the look of the weather, he prudently abandoned his attempt and descended the entire South Pillar to the glacier at its base.

  As Casarotto made his way across the final stretch of glacier before base camp, climbers watching through binoculars from the camp saw him pause in front of a narrow crevasse that blocked his path and prepare to hop across it. To their horror, as he did so the soft snow at the edge of the crevasse gave way and Casarotto suddenly disappeared, plunging 130 feet into the bowels of the glacier. Alive but badly injured in a pool of ice water at the bottom of the crevasse, he pulled his walkie-talkie out of his pack and called Goretta. At base camp, she heard her husband's voice whispering over the radio, "Goretta, I have fallen. I am dying. Please send help. Quickly!"

  A multinational rescue party immediately set out, reaching the crevasse in the last light of the day. A pulley system was soon rigged, and Casarotto, still conscious, was hauled to the surface of the ice. He stood upright, took a few steps, then lay down on his rucksack and died.

  The only expedition on K2 to make no effort to conform to Messnerian ethics was a mammoth, nationally sponsored, team from South Korea. Indeed, the Koreans didn't care how they got to the top of K2, just so long as they got someone from their team there, and then got him back down again in one piece. To that end, they employed 450 porters to haul a small mountain of gear and supplies to base camp, and then methodically proceeded to string miles of fixed rope and a chain of well-stocked camps up the Abruzzi Spur.

  Late in the day on August 3, in perfect weather, three Koreans reached the summit using bottled oxygen. After starting their descent, they were overtaken by two exhausted Poles and a Czech who, using conventional siege tactics but no oxygen, had just succeeded in making the first ascent of the route on which Casarotto and the two Americans had perished-Messner's coveted Magic Line. As both parties descended together into the night, a famous Polish alpinist named Wojciech Wroz-his attention dulled by hypoxia and fatigue-inadvertently rappeled off the end of a fixed rope in the dark-the seventh casualty of the season. The next day, Muhammed Ali, a Pakistani porter ferrying loads near the base of the mountain, became victim number eight when he was hit by a falling rock.

  Most of the Europeans and Americans on the Baltoro that summer had initially disparaged the ponderous, dated methods by which the Koreans made their way up the Abruzzi Spur. But as the season wore on and the mountain prevailed, a number of these climbers quietly abandoned their previously ballyhooed principles and made free use of the ladder of ropes and tents the Koreans had erected on the Abruzzi.

  Seven men and women from Poland, Austria, and Britain succumbed to this temptation after their original expeditions packed it in, and decided to loosely join forces on the Abruzzi. As the Koreans prepared to make their final assault, the ad hoc group made its way up the lower flanks of the mountain. Although this multinational "team" ascended at different speeds and were widely scattered over the route, all five men and two women had reached Camp IV at 26,250 feet-the highest camp-the evening before the Koreans mounted their successful summit bid.

  While the Koreans made their way to the top in the flawless weather of July 3, the Austro-Anglo-Polish team remained in their tents at Camp IV, having decided to wait a day to make their own push for the summit. The reasons for this decision are not entirely clear; whatever the explanation, by the time the European team finally started up the summit tower on the morning of the fourth, the weather was about to change. "There were great plumes of clouds blowing in from the south over Chogolisa," says Jim Curran, a British climber and filmmaker who was down at base camp at the time. "It became obvious that major bad weather was on the way. Everyone must have been aware that they were taking a great risk by pressing on, but I think when the summit of K2 is within your reach, you might be inclined to take a few more chances than you normally would. It was, in retrospect, a mistake."

  Thirty-four-year-old Alan Rouse, one of England's most accomplished climbers, and Dobroslawa Wolf, a thirty-year-old Polish woman, were the first to start up the summit pyramid, but Wolf quickly tired and dropped back. Rouse continued, however, taking on the exhausting work of breaking trail by himself for most of the day until, at three-thirty in the afternoon, just below the top, he was finally caught by Austrians Willi Bauer, forty-four, and Alfred Imitzer, forty. About 4 P.M. the three men reached the summit, and Rouse, the first Englishman to reach the top of K2, commemorated the event by hanging a Union Jack from two oxygen cylinders the Koreans had left. During the threesome's descent, five hundred feet below the summit, they saw Wolf asleep in the snow, and after a heated discussion Rouse persuaded her that she should turn around and go down with him.

  Soon thereafter, Rouse also met two other members of the team on their way up, Austrian Kurt Diemberger and Englishwoman Julie Tullis. The fifty-four-year-old Diemberger was a celebrity in western Europe, a legendary Bergsteiger whose career spanned two generations. He had been a partner of the notorious Herman Buhl, and had climbed five 8,000-meter peaks. Tullis, forty-seven, was both a protegee and extremely close friend of Diemberger's, and though she didn't possess a great deal of Himalayan experience, she was very determined, very strong, and had been to the top of Broad Peak with Diemberger in 1984. Climbing K2 together was a dream that had consumed the two of them for years.

  Because of the late hour and the rapidly deteriorating weather, Rouse, Bauer, and Imitzer all tried to persuade Diemberger and Tullis to forego the summit and head down. They mulled this advice over, but, as Diemberger later told a British newspaper, "I was convinced it was better to try it finally after all these years. And Julie, too, said, `Yes, I think we should go on.' There was a risk; but climbing is about justifi
able risks." At 7 P.M., when Diemberger and Tullis got to the summit, that risk indeed appeared to have been justified. They hugged each other, and Tullis gushed, "Kurt, our dream is finally fulfilled: K2 is now ours!" They stayed on top about ten minutes, snapped a few pictures, and then, as the gloaming faded into the cold, bitter blackness of the night, turned to go down, joined by fifty feet of rope.

  Almost immediately after leaving the summit, Tullis, who was above Diemberger, slipped. "For a fraction of a second," says Diemberger, "I thought I could hold us, but then we both started sliding down the steep slope, which led to a huge ice cliff. I thought, `My God, this is it. This is the end.' " At the foot of the mountain during the ascent from base camp, they had come across the body of Liliane Barrard, where it had landed following her ten-thousandfoot fall from the upper slopes of the peak three weeks earlier, and the image of Barrard's broken form now flashed into Diemberger's mind. "The same thing," he mused with despair, "is happening to us."

  But somehow, miraculously, they managed to stop their slide before shooting over the edge of the ice cliff. Then, fearing another fall in the dark, instead of continuing down they simply hacked out a shallow hollow in the snow and spent the remainder of the night there, above 27,000 feet, shivering together in the open. In the morning the storm was upon them in earnest, Tullis had developed frostbite on her nose and fingers, and she was having problems with her eyesight-possibly indicating the onset of cerebral edema-but the two climbers had survived the night. By noon, when they reached the tents of Camp IV and the company of their five fellow climbers, they thought the worst was behind them.

  As the day progressed, the storm worsened, generating prodigious amounts of snow, winds in excess of 100 miles per hour, and subzero temperatures. The tent Diemberger and Tullis were in collapsed under the brunt of the storm, so he crowded into Rouse's and Wolfs tent, and she moved into the tent of Bauer, Imitzer, and Hannes Wieser, an Austrian who hadn't gone to the summit.

  Sometime during the night of August 6, while the storm continued to build, the combined effects of the cold, the altitude, and the ordeal of Tullis's fall and forced bivouac caught up to her, and she died. In the morning, when Diemberger learned of her death he was shattered. Later that day, the six survivors used up the last of their food and-even more ominously-the last of their fuel, without which they couldn't melt snow for water. - - -- - -- - - - - -

  - - - - Over the next three days, as their blood thickened and their strength drained away, Diemberger says they "reached the stage where it is hard to tell dreams from reality." Diemberger, drifting in and out of bizarre hallucinatory episodes, watched Rouse go downhill much faster than the rest of them and eventually sink into a state of constant delirium, apparently paying the price for the energy and fluid he expended breaking trail by himself on the summit day. Rouse, recalls Diemberger, "could speak only of water. But there wasn't any, not even a drop. And the snow that we were trying to eat was so cold and dry that it barely melted in our mouths."

  On the morning of August 10, after five days of unabated storm, the temperature dropped to minus-twenty degrees Fahrenheit, and the gale continued to blow as hard as ever, but the snow stopped falling and the sky cleared. Those who were still able to think clearly realized that if they didn't make their move right then, they weren't going to have enough strength left to make a move at all.

  Diemberger, Wolf, Imitzer, Bauer, and Wieser immediately started down. They believed they had no chance of getting Rouse down in his semicomatose condition, so they made him as comfortable as they could and left him in his tent. No one harbored any illusions that they would see him again. The five conscious survivors, in fact, were in such bad shape themselves that the descent quickly deteriorated into a case of everyone for himself.

  Within a few hundred feet of leaving camp, Wieser and Imitzer collapsed from the effort of struggling through the waist-deep snow. "We tried in vain to stir them," Diemberger says. "Only Alfred reacted at all, weakly. He murmured that he couldn't see anything." Wieser and Imitzer were left where they lay, and with Bauer breaking trail, the other three kept fighting their way down. A few hours later Wolf dropped behind and did not reappear, and the team was down to two.

  Bauer and Diemberger made it to Camp III at 24,000 feet, only to find that it had been destroyed by an avalanche. They pressed on toward Camp II, at 21,000 feet, where, after dark, they arrived to find food, fuel, and shelter.

  By this time, according to Jim Curran, everyone at base camp had "totally given up hope for the climbers still on the mountain." They were incredulous, therefore, when, as it was getting dark on the following evening, "we saw this figure stumbling slowly down the moraine toward camp, looking like an apparition."

  The apparition was Bauer-horribly frostbitten, barely alive, too exhausted and dehydrated to even speak. Eventually he managed to convey that Diemberger, too, was still alive somewhere above, and Curran and two Polish climbers immediately set out to look for him. They found Diemberger at midnight, moving at a crawl down the fixed ropes between Camp II and Camp I and spent all the next day getting him to base camp, from where, on August 16, he and Bauer were evacuated by helicopter to face months in hospitals and multiple amputations of their fingers and toes.

  When garbled word of this final disaster reached Europe, it became headline news. Initially, particularly in England, the oncepopular Diemberger was vilified by the media for leaving Rouse to die at Camp IV, especially after Rouse, instead of beating a safe and hasty retreat from the high camp on August 5, had waited, apparently, for Diemberger and Tullis to make it down from their overnight ordeal on the summit pyramid.

  Curran insists that such criticism is unjustified. Rouse and the others, he believes, stayed at Camp IV on August 5 not primarily to wait for Diemberger and Tullis, but because they "must have been incredibly tired from the day before, and the storm would have made it extremely difficult to find the route from Camp IV to Camp III. The area around Camp IV, remember, is nearly featureless, and everyone was aware that Michel Parmentier had nearly gotten lost trying to find his way down from there in similar conditions."

  And when the descent was finally begun from Camp IV, says Curran, "there was absolutely no way that either Diemberger or Willi Bauer could have gotten Rouse off the mountain alive. They were both nearly dead themselves. It was an unimaginably desperate situation; I don't think it's possible to pass judgment about it from afar."

  Still, it's difficult to resist the temptation to compare the turn of events in 1986 to a strikingly similar predicament eight K2 climbers found themselves in thirty-three years earlier, at very nearly the same place on the mountain. The climbers, part of an American expedition led by Dr. Charles Houston, were camped at 25,000 feet on the then-unclimbed Abruzzi route, preparing to make a push for the summit, when they were hit by a blizzard of unusual severity that kept them pinned in their tents for nine days. Toward the end of this storm, a young climber named Art Gilkey came down with a deadly ailment called thrombophlebitis, a clotting of the veins brought on by altitude and dehydration.

  Gilkey's seven companions, in no great shape themselves, though considerably better off than Diemberger and company, realized that Gilkey stood almost no chance of surviving, and that trying to save him would endanger them all. Nevertheless, says Houston, "So strong had become the bonds between them that none thought of leaving him and saving themselves-it was not to be dreamed of, even though he would probably die of his illness." In the course of being lowered down the mountain, Gilkey was swept to his death by an avalanche, but one can't help but be impressed by how his companions stuck by him to the bitter end, even though in doing so they were all very nearly killed.

  It can be argued that the decision not to abandon Gilkey in 195 3 was the height of heroism-or that it was a foolishly sentimental act, that had an avalanche not fortuitously taken Gilkey off his teammates' hands, their chivalrous gesture would have resulted in eight deaths instead of one. Viewed in that light, the decision by t
hose who survived K2 in 1986 to leave terminally weakened partners seems not coldhearted or cowardly, but rather eminently sensible.

  But if the actions of Diemberger and Bauer appear to be justified, larger, more troubling questions remain. It is natural in any sport to seek ever-greater challenges; what is to be made of a sport in which to do so also means taking ever-greater risks? Should a civilized society continue to condone, much less celebrate, an activity in which there appears to be a growing acceptance of death as a likely outcome?

  For as long as people have been climbing in the Himalaya, a significant percentage of them have been dying there as well, but the carnage on K2 in 1986 was something else again. A recent and very comprehensive analysis of the data shows that, from the beginning of Himalayan climbing through 1985, approximately one out of every thirty people who has attempted an 8,000-meter peak has not come back from it alive; on K2 last summer that figure was, alarmingly, almost one out of five.

  It is hard not to attribute that worrisome statistic at least in part to Reinhold Messner's remarkable string of Himalayan feats over the past decade and a half. Messner's brilliance has, perhaps, distorted the judgment of some of those who would compete with him; the bold new ground Messner broke may have given unwar ranted confidence to many climbers who lack the uncanny "mountain sense" that's kept Messner alive all these years. A handful of alpinists from France and Poland may have what it takes to stay at the table in the high-roller's game that Messner launched, but some men and women seem to have lost sight of the fact that the losers in such games tend to lose very big.

  Curran cautions that one can't make generalizations about why so many people died in the Karakoram last summer. He points out that "people got killed climbing with fixed ropes and without fixed ropes; people got killed at the top of the mountain and the bottom; old people got killed and young people got killed."