K2 Life and death on the world's most dangerous mountain

Camp VI on K2, 1939. K2 is no Mount Everest. It's some 700 feet shorter - and a lot more deadly. Located in the Karakoram Range of northern Pakistan, K2, the second-tallest mountain in the world, clocks in at 28,251 feet. Unlike at Everest, you will not, at least not yet, find commercial climbing operations hoisting paying clients topside. K2 remains what you might call a "mountaineers' mountain." To wit: last year at least 290 people topped out on Everest, while only 18 climbers summited K2 and 11 died trying. Given K2's fearful reputation, it makes sense that a close study of the most dramatic attempts on the peak, which the veteran climber Ed Viesturs offers in "K2 : Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain," reveals a good deal about the rarefied noble-gonzo world of high-altitude mountaineering. Viesturs, who wrote the book with David Roberts, claims that the mountain has a lot to teach us about "risk, ambition, loyalty to one's teammates, self sacrifice and the price of glory." He should know. Viesturs's bona fides include being the first American to climb the world's 14 8,000-meter peaks (thus joining an elite fraternity of 16 other members). But it was a seminal experience on K2 that affected - and haunts - him most. Eight weeks into his own 1992 expedition on K2, having already survived a massive avalanche by executing a split-second "self-arrest" while he and Scott Fischer (who later died on Everest) were hurling toward an 8,000-foot fall, Viesturs and his partners finally achieved their summit. But a shot at success had meant making the dodgy decision to climb into a rapidly forming storm. Viesturs's gut hollered, "This is the worst decision in the world," but he kept going. Vicious weather enveloped the mountain, and a hair-raising descent ensued. But a narrow escape makes the glory more glorious, right? Not for Viesturs. Never again, he vowed. He knew he'd just gotten lucky. This experience forged the fundamental ideas about climbing, and life, that frame his book. Last year's K2 disaster is offered as Viesturs's first teachable moment. He says a crowded mountain awash in language barriers, summit fever and the false security of fixed ropes had already created relative anarchy on the August day in 2008 when some 30 climbers set out for the peak. Add to the human chaos the collapse of a giant serac - a "geologic fluke" that wiped out most of the fixed ropes - and you get a series of events that claimed 11 lives. But how did things on K2 get to this point? With a whiff of nostalgia for an ethic he feels is disappearing, Viesturs looks back at the 1938 expedition and what is considered the first real attempt on the mountain. After hiking in 360 miles (today's climbers fly in), the Americans who made up the climbing team said goodbye to most of their Sherpas, leaving them with a bag of rocks: "Throw away one stone every day. . . . When they are all gone, come back to meet us." This pioneering team, wearing hobnail boots and wielding hemp ropes - and stopping for the occasional smoke - made phenomenal first ascents, broke the 25,000-foot barrier, took care of one another and gathered vital reconnaissance for future attempts. They also kept "dirty laundry" to themselves - an old-school principle Viesturs says is lost in today's deluge of tell-all climbing books. Reopening a cold case of sorts, Viesturs also retells the story of the 1939 expedition. The crack climber Fritz Wiessner and the Sherpa Pasang Lama reached a dazzling 27,500 feet before the attempt fatally broke down. The climbing community fingered Wiessner as an authoritarian who ruled from on high. Yet blame, it seems, lay below. In a severe case of "crump" (when all ambition is lost and one just wants to get out and go home), the inexperienced base camp team prematurely declared the summit party dead and had Sherpas take down the carefully stocked upper camps (though they later blamed the Sherpas). This disastrous act forced Wiessner and Lama into a brutal descent without food or shelter that they only narrowly survived, and led, indirectly, to the deaths of the climber Dudley Wolfe and of Pasang Kikuli, Pasang Kitar and Phinsoo (three Sherpas who valiantly tried to save Wolfe). Viesturs laments the vilification of Wiessner and the dismal human error that led to the fatalities on his climb. The expedition was also an early example of how poorly high-altitude mountaineers can, at times, treat Sherpas. "When something screws up, the Sherpas are the first ones to be blamed. But when a Sherpa performs heroically," the author writes, "they barely get credited, and often they are not even named." World War II and then the splitting of Pakistan from India put attempts on K2 out of reach until the 1950s, when two members of the 1938 climb meticulously put together a team, emphasizing trust, talent and camaraderie - all of which they would need in spades. They were in striking distance of the summit when a storm hit. Seven frigid, tedious days later, they crawled out of their battered tents only to have their team member Art Gilkey collapse with thrombophlebitis, instantly turning the expedition into a nightmarish rescue mission. In perilous conditions, seven strungtogether (and strung-out) climbers tried to maneuver the now immobilized Gilkey across an icy slope. When one climber slipped, the other climbers, one by one, were plucked off the mountain and began careening toward oblivion. Only a spectacular ice arrest by the seventh and final climber, Pete Schoening - today regarded as the "miracle belay" - stopped the unfolding tragedy. The injured, frostbitten men regrouped and tried to set up an emergency camp. As they did, Gilkey, who was secured out of sight around an outcrop, was freakily swept away by an avalanche. Or, less plausibly, did he cut his own rope to save the rest of the team? On their desperate descent, they followed down streaks of his blood. Gilkey's death, no doubt, had meant their survival. Death and amputations underscore most of the lessons Viesturs gleans from these affecting expeditions: never rappel using a ski pole as an anchor, always wand your route (that is, leave a trail of sticks should a storm wipe out your tracks), never head for the summit too late in the day, never have a love affair mountainside. (So it's 20 below and you're looking down the gullet of mortality. Must. Stay. Focused.) Viesturs's conservative manifesto boils down to this: Listen to your gut and take care of your comrades; getting to the summit is optional, but getting down is mandatory. Simple? Maybe. But many of the world's best climbers cut the margin razor-thin time and again and make daring? noble? suicidal? sponsor-influenced? (you pick) choices in the face of summit fever or in oxygen-deprived hallucinatory states. On K2, for every four climbers who reach the summit, one dies. Why take on such odds? As in many climbing books, the why is insufficiently addressed for those of us content with lesser mountains or even armchairs. Still, even without that answer or the riveting morality play of, say, an "Into Thin Air," "K2" is gripping. Viesturs may sound a note of Boy Scout righteousness now and then, but maybe he's earned it. After all, he's lived to tell. Holly Morris is the author of "Adventure Divas" and a presenter on the PBS series "Globe Trekker."

In August 2008, 11 mountaineers died in quick succession on the slopes of K2, the world's second-tallest mountain. Beginning with that catastrophe, veteran climber Viesturs undertakes with coauthor Roberts a sprawling examination of K2 and the generations of adventurers who have tried to reach its summit. Viesturs artfully combines his memories with technical information and historical narrative in an effort to understand the more spectacular tragedies and triumphs on K2. Drawing on other climbers' memoirs and interviews as well, Viesturs juxtaposes their experiences with his own in vivid anecdotal passages. His scattershot approach can be overwhelming, as he simultaneously relates the stories of many different expeditions from different eras. But his amiable voice and strong opinions tie the pieces together. At his best, Viesturs falls into a rhythm as he flashes back and forth through history without diminishing his overarching theme, as during his running discussion of interpersonal squabbles on the mountain. More than anything, he captures the obsessive passion that has driven climbers up the slopes of K2 for decades, unchanged by time and technology.--Werth, Joshua Copyright 2009 Booklist

Facing the world's second-highest peak, the Karakoram Range's K2 in Northern Pakistan, mountain climbers encounter incredible dangers, including a huge serac (an overhanging glacier), snow-obscured crevasses, whiteouts and avalanches that have killed even accomplished mountaineers. With clarity and compassion, renowned peak-scaler Viesturs recounts campaigns up K2's 28,000-plus feet from the late 1930s through the tragic 2008 season that saw 11 climbers die in the space of 36 hours. An American master of the climb, Viesturs shares secrets, inside jokes, history and lore such as the "psychological protection" afforded by clipping onto rope or handrails, the climbers' habit of "looking up to see if anything's coming your way," and the "miracle" of "one man with a single ax and a grip of steel stopping the otherwise fatal fall of six teammates and of himself." Admitting to "a disturbing fanaticism" that's driven himself and others to tackle the world's fourteen 8000-foot-plus peaks, Viesturs's you-are-there narration communicates effortlessly the enormous effort, and high adventure, of scaling K2. (Oct.) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

Introduction In the wee hours of the morning of August 1, 2008, some thirty climbers from ten different expeditions set out from their high camps on the Abruzzi Ridge of K2. At 28,251 feet the world's second- tallest mountain, K2, thrusts skyward out of the Karakoram Range of northern Pakistan. After weeks of sitting out bad weather, the mountaineers were poised to go for the summit on a clear and windless day. During the endless storms, morale at base camp had reached rock bottom, and some climbers had thrown in the towel and gone home. But now everybody still on the mountain was jazzed. As they emerged from their cramped tents to clip on crampons and hoist packs, the climbers were riding a manic high. Sometime that day, they thought, they would claim one of the most elusive and glorious prizes in mountaineering. For most of these men and women, K2 was the goal of a lifetime.   Chapter 1: T H E M OT I VATOR Although the various teams were operating independently, they had tried to cobble together a common logistical plan that would help everyone get to the top. The crucial feature of that plan was the fixing of thin nylon ropes-- to be used on the way up, in effect, as handrails, and on the way down as lines that could be easily rappelled. Those fixed ropes were intended to ensure the climbers' passage through the Bottleneck, a steep and dangerous couloir of snow and ice that rises from an altitude of 26,400 feet.   The Bottleneck and the sketchy leftward traverse at the top of it form the "crux" of the Abruzzi Ridge. Although climbing the Bottleneck is only moderately difficult, what makes that high gauntlet so nerve- racking is a gigantic serac-- a cliff of solid ice-- that looms above it. Weighing many tons, poised at a vertical and, in places, an overhanging angle, the serac looks as though it is barely attached to the mountain. Yet in the sixtynine years since mountaineers first came to grips with this formidable obstacle, the serac had proved remarkably stable. It seemed, indeed, to be a permanent feature of K2's summit pyramid.   Thirty climbers crawling up the same route on the same day would have been business as usual on Mount Everest. On K2--a far more serious mountain, and one that has seen far fewer attempts-- such a crowd was unprecedented. Still, as they approached the Bottleneck, thanks to the perfect weather for which they had waited so long, the climbers were awash in optimism. The summit was within their grasp.   And then things started to go subtly wrong. Small mistakes were made. Miscommunications, fueled by the many different languages the climbers spoke, flared into angry words. The slower climbers began to block the way for those who were capable of moving faster. Yet the single event that turned an awkward day into a catastrophe was nobody's fault.   Within the next thirty- six hours, eleven of those mountaineers would die high on the Abruzzi Ridge. The disaster that unfolded on August 1 would end up as the worst single- event tragedy in the mountain's history, and the second worst in the long chronicle of mountaineering in the Himalaya and the Karakoram.   And nobody saw it coming. -------------   Almost sixteen years earlier, on August 16, 1992, with my partners Scott Fischer and Charley Mace, I had left our high camp in the predawn darkness and started trudging up toward the Bottleneck. On that day, I, too, had been full of bursting hope, tempered by the wary alertness that is the obligatory state of mind for any alpinist who wants to stay alive in the great ranges. I had previously climbed Everest and Kangchenjunga, the first- and third- highest peaks in the world, but I knew that K2 was in another league of difficulty and danger.   Like 2008's climbers, Scott, Charley, and I had had to bide our time for interminable weeks before we finally got a crack at the summit. Not Excerpted from K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs, David Roberts All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.