The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 by Jennifer Jordan

only $900 of the necessary $1,500 of his expedition fee * and Fisher asked whether Jack could raise the last $600 from friends and family. Within a few phone calls, Jack had received four pledges totaling the $600. After selling three pairs of skis for “pocket money,” buying a life insurance policy, and breaking the news to his girlfriend, Maria, and his mother, America, in Florida, he was on his way to K2.
    On the night of his departure, Fisher held a dinner party in Jack’s honor at his Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park in New York. Sitting at Fisher’s dining-room table that night, Jack listened as another guest, Charlie Houston, voiced his concerns that Fritz’s team was “seriously weak in its composition and experience.” Although he was a year younger than Jack, Houston commanded the conversation around the long table, his bright blue eyes sparkling.
    A year before, Houston and Bob Bates had painstakingly chosen from scores of would-be teammates the six men who would perform well as a team, on and off the mountain. Houston knew that above all else, the friendship and respect between members went a lot farther than mere climbing resumés to get a team safely up and off an 8,000-meter peak. He didn’t see either on Fritz’s ragtag team. Privately, Charlie also worried that his old friend had dangerous ambitions. Before leaving, Fritz had told him, “If I can climb this mountain, I’ll be set for life. Then I can come home, marry a rich girl, and retire.” Charlie couldn’t help but think it was an odd way to approach a mountain, any mountain, and K2 was not just any mountain; to set such ironclad goals for so unforgiving a peak was pure folly. But Fritz was struggling, privately and professionally. It was a bad time for Germans in America, and Fritz seemed to need K2, rather than just desiring it. That, Charlie thought, made this a doomed undertaking.
    As Charlie looked across the table at Jack Durrance, he sized up the man. He liked him, liked his confidence and his movie-star good looks. But he also worried that the handsome medical student and brash skier had a swagger about him that might clash with Fritz. Charlie knew that there can only be one leader on an expedition and on this expedition that leader was Fritz. It had been one of the reasons he had not wanted to go to K2 with Fritz; as much as he liked the man, he knew that he and Fritz would lock horns over who was in charge.
    Finally, Charlie offered Jack some valuable high-altitude medical tips, as he would be the assumed expedition doctor heading into the wilds of the Himalayas. Frostbite, Charlie told him, would be the team’s biggest concern. The treatment was basic: descend to base camp at once and keep the damaged skin dry, clean, and in the sun, without doing further damage through sunburn.
    With that, Charlie rose from the table without ceremony or excuse, thanked Joel and Mrs. Fisher for dinner, wished Jack well, and quickly left the apartment. His failure to reach the summit of K2 the year before still irked him. He had been so damn close and it still ate at him that it had come down to a handful of matches, matches that he himself had miscalculated. Years later Houston would admit that he had climbed as high as he was able, but in 1939, only months after he returned from the mountain, he still believed it had been in his grasp. That evening, seeing Jack heading to what had become his K2 suddenly felt more painful than he cared to admit. He walked the deserted streets of Manhattan’s Upper East Side for hours, alone and lost in his thoughts.
    After a glass or two of celebratory cognac, Fisher escorted Jack to the harbor where the SS Europa was loading its passengers for a midnight departure. Fisher showed him around the boat and then stood waving on the shore while the steamship slipped from the pier toward Europe. At about only half the cost of what the other team members paid, and almost none of it from his own pocket,