The High Road To Failure

It was two years ago this spring that the largest U.S. climbing expedition of the decade reached the 20,500-foot level of Mount K2 in the Karakoram Himalaya. The goal was to push on to the 28,741-foot summit by an unexplored northwest ridge, the same ridge that marks the border between Pakistan and China. There had been seven previous assaults on the world's second-highest peak, and only an Italian team, in 1954, had made it to the top by way of the far easier southeast spur, or Abruzzi Ridge.

The Americans had set out in mid-April of 1975 knowing that the odds against success were high, and had encountered unexpected obstacles from the start. Only one scouting flight had been allowed near the proposed route, and the plane had not been permitted to approach the Chinese border. Both Pakistan and China had prevented the team from landing people and equipment any closer than 100 miles from the proposed base camp. Storms had delayed some flights. When the party finally reached the snow line one month behind schedule, most of the high-altitude porters quit to join other expeditions to lesser peaks. Equipment was strung out over too great a distance.

There were nine principals in the party, most of them from the Seattle area. In one group, which became known as the Big Four, were Expedition Leader Jim Whittaker, 46, the first American to climb Everest; Jim's twin brother Lou; Deputy Leader Jim Wickwire, 34, and Jim Whittaker's wife, Dianne Roberts, 26. The others, who referred to themselves as the Minority Five, were Leif-Norman Patterson, 39; Fred Dunham, 34; Fred Stanley, 31; Dr. Robert T. Schaller Jr., 39; Steve Marts, 36; and Galen Rowell, 34, a writer and photographer from Albany, Calif. All were experienced climbers. Accompanying the mountaineers were Major Manzoor Hussain of the Pakistani Army, the group's liaison officer, and 14 HAPs, or high-altitude porters.

As the delays continued, tensions began to divide the mountaineers; at one point the two Freds decided to quit. Only the prospect of trekking alone across 70 miles of uninhabited mountains before reaching the nearest village prevented them from leaving. Time was clearly running out. The rest of the story unfolds in this excerpt from Rowell's soon-to-be-published book, In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods.

June 21, 1975 was the solstice. But there was no summer in the Karakoram. Nothing was green. No birds chirped, no insects buzzed. It had been snowing steadily for three days. At 17,500 feet on a broad glacier, base camp looked like a deserted outpost in the Arctic.

My life seemed as empty and barren as the landscape. My bronchitis had developed into pneumonia and I was trying to bide the time until I was well again. My only contact with Dr. Rob Schaller was by radio. Rob, Steve Marts, Jim Wickwire and Lou Whittaker were waiting out the storm in Camp II, 3,000 feet above me, unable to descend because of blizzard conditions and avalanche danger. Rob had prescribed Keflex, a strong antibiotic, but that was all he could do. I tried to sleep sitting up because I couldn't breathe well lying down. Every night I sat half-awake under the strange delusion that I had two heads attached to the same body.

Fred Stanley and Fred Dunham were also in base camp. Stanley had some sort of stomach ailment and Dunham had a very bad cough. When they were healthy, they were willing to work, but not too hard and not too long. If they felt sick, as they did that day, they simply took sick leave.

Those in the high camps were constantly insinuating that the two Freds were fudging and that they could have gone higher on the mountain if only they had had the desire. The Freds overheard many of these thinly veiled sarcasms and were reinforced in their belief that the expedition's only concern for their welfare had to do with their ability to shuttle loads. The attitude of those in charge was "If I had a cough or a stomachache it wouldn't stop me from going on the mountain," and it was sincere. Feeling under the weather would never have prevented them from climbing to higher altitudes. But Fred Stanley and Fred Dunham valued their health and safety far more than the glory of reaching the summit. Maybe, as some had suggested, they really did not belong on K2. But this attitude implied that the rest of us had cornered the market on the one right way to climb a mountain, and I didn't buy that notion at all. Other considerations aside, the two Freds had definitely lost interest in the climb by this time. This might not have happened if they had been treated differently. Dunham no longer took the expedition seriously, and called it "the highest Boy Scout Jamboree in history."

Still, I was going to stick with it. I was prepared to work hard at high altitude day after day in order to establish the route for whoever would go to the summit. I had geared myself to suffer all manner of discomfort and discontent. I was ready to be away from base camp for a month or more, to sleep in camps that became increasingly colder and smaller, to feel my breathing change from an automatic reflex to a consciously controlled effort and to temporarily deprive myself of the tiny luxuries of human existence. In short, I was ready to climb the mountain.

Still suffering from bronchitis, I had arrived at Savoia Pass on the afternoon of June 16 with Lou, Wick, Rob and Steve. The five of us were on our way to Camp II at 20,500 feet, and most of our camp gear was on a sled near an ice face, where Jim Whittaker and Dianne were waiting for us to set up the winch that Fred Stanley had hauled up to the pass several days before. We had pulled up a single load of gear shortly before dark, left the rest near the winch and climbed to the campsite.