it was still in place—the single fixed rope on the mountain above Camp IV. It was anchored, with a pair of ice screws, only at either end, so if you came off in the middle of the traverse, you’d take a horrendousyo-yo plunge before the stretchy nylon rope would catch you—assuming that neither of the anchors pulled. All the same, we clipped in to the rope and used it like a handrail, counting on what climbers jokingly call “psychological” protection.
The traverse was sketchy. The points of our crampons barely gained purchase on the downward-sloping slabs of rock that lay just beneath the sugary snow. Falling was not an option, but staying attached to the face took all the concentration we could muster.
By shortly after sunrise, we were past the traverse and had started up the long diagonal ramp that leads to the summit snowfield. We were still more than a thousand feet below the top, with some five or six hours of climbing ahead of us, but we knew that the ground only got easier above. Things were looking really positive.
All morning, however, a sea of clouds below us had been slowly but steadily rising. At 7:00 A.M., the sea engulfed us. It was still completely calm, and eerily warm—so warm that I took off my hat. But then it started to snow; the big, soft, fluffy flakes quickly grew so thick that I started inhaling them as I panted in the thin air. We were still roped together, because even on the summit snowfield there are crevasses you could fall into. We continued to swap leads as we plowed through the breakable crust.
As we trudged slowly upward in silence, I started calculating. Five hours to the summit, three back down to here—what are conditions going to be like eight hours from now if it keeps snowing? It was then that the knot started to form in my gut. As I later wrote in my diary, I was wondering, “What to do? The prudent thing is to turn back, but we keep going. Stupid? Probably. This is the worst part of climbing big peaks. Spend tons of $ & time to get to this point & you’re faced with this decision.”
Scott and Charley obviously weren’t going through the same kind of agonizing appraisal. When I finally stopped them and asked, “Hey, what do you guys think?,” Scott answered, “Whaddya mean?” and Charlie seconded him: “We’re going up!”
So I kept heading upward, putting off my decision from one half hourto the next. I thought,
Why are they comfortable with this and I’m not? Am I a sissy? Do I worry too much? Am I too conservative?
All that ambivalence, all that self-questioning just ate away at me, and the knot in my gut grew heavier.
As we got closer to the summit and the falling snow showed no signs of letting up, I knew I was making the greatest mistake of my climbing life. And yet I kept going.
During the seventeen years since K2, I’ve thought long and hard about why I didn’t turn around on August 16, 1992. There was certainly a voice in my head taunting me:
What are other people going to say if I go down while Scott and Charley make the summit?
Yet today I can honestly state that my partners’ eagerness to push ahead was not what swayed me. It was, instead, my perverse inability to make a decision. In my head at the time, a broken record was playing:
I wish I didn’t have to make this decision right now. This is the worst decision in the world
.
What happened to me in 2002 on Annapurna gave me much-needed clarity about what had gone on a decade earlier on K2. On May 14 of that year, J.-C. Lafaille and Alberto Iñurrategi completed an exposed and dangerous snow-and-ice traverse under a tower called the Roc Noir, then began climbing the steep face to regain the crest of the east ridge. Coming along a little behind the lead pair, Veikka Gustafsson and I reached the traverse at 7:30 A.M. I started to lead across, but I realized at once that the slope was loaded with snow ready to slide. All it might take to trigger a fatal avalanche was somebody kicking steps in
The traverse was sketchy. The points of our crampons barely gained purchase on the downward-sloping slabs of rock that lay just beneath the sugary snow. Falling was not an option, but staying attached to the face took all the concentration we could muster.
By shortly after sunrise, we were past the traverse and had started up the long diagonal ramp that leads to the summit snowfield. We were still more than a thousand feet below the top, with some five or six hours of climbing ahead of us, but we knew that the ground only got easier above. Things were looking really positive.
All morning, however, a sea of clouds below us had been slowly but steadily rising. At 7:00 A.M., the sea engulfed us. It was still completely calm, and eerily warm—so warm that I took off my hat. But then it started to snow; the big, soft, fluffy flakes quickly grew so thick that I started inhaling them as I panted in the thin air. We were still roped together, because even on the summit snowfield there are crevasses you could fall into. We continued to swap leads as we plowed through the breakable crust.
As we trudged slowly upward in silence, I started calculating. Five hours to the summit, three back down to here—what are conditions going to be like eight hours from now if it keeps snowing? It was then that the knot started to form in my gut. As I later wrote in my diary, I was wondering, “What to do? The prudent thing is to turn back, but we keep going. Stupid? Probably. This is the worst part of climbing big peaks. Spend tons of $ & time to get to this point & you’re faced with this decision.”
Scott and Charley obviously weren’t going through the same kind of agonizing appraisal. When I finally stopped them and asked, “Hey, what do you guys think?,” Scott answered, “Whaddya mean?” and Charlie seconded him: “We’re going up!”
So I kept heading upward, putting off my decision from one half hourto the next. I thought,
Why are they comfortable with this and I’m not? Am I a sissy? Do I worry too much? Am I too conservative?
All that ambivalence, all that self-questioning just ate away at me, and the knot in my gut grew heavier.
As we got closer to the summit and the falling snow showed no signs of letting up, I knew I was making the greatest mistake of my climbing life. And yet I kept going.
During the seventeen years since K2, I’ve thought long and hard about why I didn’t turn around on August 16, 1992. There was certainly a voice in my head taunting me:
What are other people going to say if I go down while Scott and Charley make the summit?
Yet today I can honestly state that my partners’ eagerness to push ahead was not what swayed me. It was, instead, my perverse inability to make a decision. In my head at the time, a broken record was playing:
I wish I didn’t have to make this decision right now. This is the worst decision in the world
.
What happened to me in 2002 on Annapurna gave me much-needed clarity about what had gone on a decade earlier on K2. On May 14 of that year, J.-C. Lafaille and Alberto Iñurrategi completed an exposed and dangerous snow-and-ice traverse under a tower called the Roc Noir, then began climbing the steep face to regain the crest of the east ridge. Coming along a little behind the lead pair, Veikka Gustafsson and I reached the traverse at 7:30 A.M. I started to lead across, but I realized at once that the slope was loaded with snow ready to slide. All it might take to trigger a fatal avalanche was somebody kicking steps in
Similar Books
