‘The team might have failed, but they failed in the most beautiful way imaginable.’
REINHOLD MESSNER
IN 2006 TWENTY-EIGHT people had a party. They were celebrating something very special: their own existence.
These were the descendants of an eight-man mountaineering team who, fifty-three years previously, had made an attempt on the second-highest mountain in the world, K2. These twenty-eight people knew that they would never have been born if it hadn’t been for one man’s miraculous feat of strength on the slopes of that fearsome peak.
For a mountaineer, the term ‘belaying’ refers to the use of ropes between climbers to ensure their safety as they ascend and descend. And on the unsuccessful 1953 attempt on K2, ‘the Belay’ – as it became known in mountaineering folklore – was critical.
*
Make no mistake: K2, on the border between Pakistan and China, might be only the world’s second-highest mountain, but it’s widely regarded as the most difficult Himalayan giant for any mountaineer.
Climbers regularly die on its faces, even today. And for every four people who reach the summit, one dies trying. It’s never been climbed in winter and, back in 1953, it hadn’t been climbed at all.
An eight-man American team led by Charles Houston was aiming to be the first.
You’ve heard it said that there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’. Well, this was Houston’s guiding principle as he put together his companions. They weren’t selected solely for their climbing brilliance – many technically better climbers were overlooked for the expedition – but more for their ability to get on with others in adverse conditions.
Houston made the call that when the chips were down, he wanted men of character by his side.
He could not have foretold how important this decision would turn out to be.
Among the team he assembled were a nuclear scientist from Los Alamos and a ski instructor from Seattle. There was also a geologist from Iowa called Art Gilkey, and the youngest of their company, a 27-year-old chemical engineer called Pete Schoening.
It was Schoening’s name which would go down in mountaineering history.
The attempt on the summit occurred just after Pakistan’s partition from India. This was significant. It meant that the Indian Sherpas – who, up until partition, had acted as porters on Himalayan expeditions – were not welcome in Pakistan. Conversely, the Pakistani Hunza porters were not considered to be such skilled mountaineers.
The company decided, rather than use unskilled porters to help them haul their gear, that they would travel light. This meant no unnecessary equipment and no oxygen canisters.
But abandoning local guides had its advantages. The route they were going to take was an ascent called the Abruzzi Spur. There would not be space to pitch many tents on the way up, so the fewer people in their group, the better. Or so they thought.
There’s an old Army saying: fail to prepare and you prepare to fail. For Houston’s team, preparation was key. It had all the hallmarks of an immaculately planned expedition.
The team arrived at base camp on 20 June. They would need to establish eight camps in order to crack the summit of K2. These guys spent the next six weeks climbing methodically up and down the mountain, selecting and maintaining the route, pitching the camps and making sure that the vital supplies were in place. Only on 2 August did the team finally make it to Camp 8, less than 1,000 metres from the summit, ready for the final push to the top.
Everything was looking good.
But there are some things no amount of preparation can fully predict. The weather is one. It had been deteriorating for a few days, but now, almost from nowhere, a massive storm circled round the climbers. They were forced to sit it out in the ‘Death Zone’ – the altitude above 8,000 metres where your body can no longer metabolize effectively and literally starts wasting away. All the team could do was hope that conditions would improve – and fast.
They didn’t.
The freezing, oxygen-starved air was taking its toll on the climbers’ weakened reserves. At that height the human body is dying, and everything becomes a battle. A fight just to stay alive. On the fourth day, one of their tents collapsed in the wind. On the sixth, with heavy hearts, they had no choice but to prepare to retreat – or die.
On the seventh day, the storm abated. Should they continue their ascent?
It was almost as if the mountain was toying with them.
Then fate played a deciding card.
*
The human body isn’t designed to spend extended periods at altitude. Nor does it react well to extremes of temperature. On high peaks most people think of frostbite, hypothermia or altitude sickness. In truth, there are countless ways your body can fail up a mountain. Thrombophlebitis is one of the worst.
There are no good illnesses to have in the Death Zone, but even if there were, this wouldn’t make the list.
It’s a severe inflammation of the veins caused by a blood clot. It’s sometimes called ‘White Leg’ and it requires immediate medical treatment. If the blood clot moves through your system and into your heart or lungs, it’s game over. In the mountains, where the air is thin and the blood thick, this illness is exponentially more serious than at sea level. Fatally serious. When one of the group’s number, Art Gilkey, collapsed in front of their tents that day, Houston was quickly able to diagnose the disorder.
The team had a choice to make. Gilkey’s chances of survival if he remained in the Death Zone were nil. Carrying him back down to base camp was almost impossible. In addition, the brief break in the weather had gone and the storm had now returned with renewed and worsening fury.
Mountaineers could argue that the logical thing to do would be to leave Gilkey to the mountain, in order to save the rest of the team: why let eight people die when only one death is certain?
But let’s not forget Houston’s criteria in putting these men together. This was a real team. Eight men who had agreed to stick together. No matter what.
The guys didn’t need to discuss it. There was no way they would leave Gilkey there to die. They would attempt the impossible and bring him back down to safety.
Or they would die trying.
*
The team couldn’t leave Camp 8 immediately. The storm had kicked off again, and there was an ever increasing risk of an avalanche. They were forced to remain in their cramped, freezing camp for another three days. But time was running out for them all.
The Death Zone doesn’t cut you any slack. The longer you remain inside it, the less likely you are to survive.
Gilkey’s condition was getting worse. Much worse. He was showing signs of pulmonary embolism. This meant the blood clot was in the region of his lungs. He was now coughing up blood. Death was closing in.
The storm had still not abated. But the team had no choice. They had to start their descent or perish.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention. And that’s never more true than in a survival situation. The team needed a stretcher, so they were forced to improvise one. They used some ropes, canvas from their tents and a sleeping bag to fashion a kind of cradle in which Gilkey could lie as they lowered him down the slopes. As his life was hanging by a thread, his body was hanging by a rope.
Both were completely at the mercy of his friends’ courage and resolve.
The distance between Camps 8 and 7 was only about 300 vertical metres. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but just try covering that distance under those conditions, at that altitude – and with a casualty. In order to get to Camp 7 they needed to traverse a treacherous ice face, which ended in a sheer rock cliff some 2,000 metres high. Not a place to fall.
It was tough, unforgiving climbing at the best of times, and these were the worst. Blinding gusts of wind and snow whipped up into their faces. The climbers could barely see where they were kicking their crampons in. They relied solely on the crunch and feel of the metal spikes on their boots biting securely into the ice to confirm their next step. One step at a time. Steadily. Methodically.
Four members of the team roped off in two pairs. Pete Schoening was attached to Gilkey and one other. The final man, Robert Craig, was climbing alone. Together they were trying to pendulum Gilkey across the ice face and back down to Camp 7.
Schoening was taking the weight of two men: one able-bodied, one far from it. He needed to anchor himself securely as the others tried to get Gilkey across the traverse. He drove his ice axe deep behind a frozen rock, fixed his rope to the axe, then to him, and started to pay out the rope to his colleagues from his improvised belay.
Then disaster struck.
One of the four guys slipped on a patch of highly compacted ice. Along with his partner, he went hurtling down the ice field towards the rocky precipice below. The falling climbers flew past the other paired team and somehow became entangled with the rope joining them together.
Entwined, the four climbers were now careering and screaming down the slope to their fate.
As they fell, they crossed the rope leading from Gilkey to his partner and then to Schoening far above.
Within the blink of an eye, six men were suddenly plunging towards the abyss. Six men were about to die. The only thing that might potentially save them, at the top of this tangled mess of rope, was Pete Schoening.
Schoening threw his weight on top of the axe and held on to it with all the strength in his weakened body. Any second now the combined force of six men – not to mention all the gear they were carrying – accelerating down a frictionless slope would come on to his axe with the force of a runaway train. If the ice axe remained embedded in the rock under that sort of pressure, it would be a miracle.
His teammates continued to slide.
A hundred.
Schoening gritted his teeth and waited for the rope to tighten.
It came suddenly, jarring his entire body, feeling like it would rip his limbs apart, as the rope snapped drum-tight like a metal cable. Amazingly, Schoening withstood the force and kept hold of the combined weight of that massive load. We’re talking more than 500 kilogrammes, which must have felt much greater considering the speed that the men had been accelerating downwards.
The conditions were appalling. Schoening’s hands were frozen. He was acting on pure adrenalin and through a fog of utter exhaustion.
This was ‘the Belay’. One of the most astonishing examples of strength a mountain has ever seen from mortal man. Little by little, Schoening’s teammates managed to regain their positions while he battled to hold their weight. If he hadn’t managed that Herculean feat of human endurance, all seven of them would undoubtedly have plunged to their death.
In later years Pete Schoening would say that he’d simply been lucky that day on the slopes of K2. His companions knew otherwise.
Heroes wear their laurels lightly.
*
The story wasn’t over. The guys continued to make their way down towards Camp 7 slowly. Once down, they fixed Gilkey to the ice face so that they could set up camp.
But, as they were erecting their tents, the men heard him shout weakly.
Two of the team returned to Gilkey’s position. But the ailing mountaineer was no longer there. The ice axes that were fixed into the slope were gone. It appeared that Gilkey had become the victim of an avalanche.
This was a group of men who had been specifically selected for their ability to act as a team. To pull together. To think of each other. It’s worth considering what might have been going through Art Gilkey’s head as he hung, slumped in a sleeping bag, high up on the icy faces of K2.
He would have known, of course, that his life was in the balance. But he would also have known that his companions were risking their own lives to save him. Already they had come very close to falling to their graves on that belay. If it had not been for Pete Schoening’s superhuman act of strength, they would all be dead.
They were still a long way up the mountain. Was Gilkey’s condition likely to threaten his buddies’ lives again?
Almost without doubt.
Would they listen to him if he told them to leave him on the mountain and continue without him to save themselves?
Definitely not.
Gilkey was drowsy with morphine. Even so, I can imagine him forcing himself to a sitting position in his makeshift stretcher.
Extending his arms to grab the ice axes that were fixing him to the mountain.
Using his final reserves of energy to work those axes loose.
The weakened shouts that his companions heard: Gilkey’s ultimate adieu.
Maybe Pete Schoening’s was not the only act of outstanding courage on the high faces of K2 that day. Perhaps Art Gilkey had decided that his friends had risked enough, and that there was only one course of action open to him.
A course of action that would lead to his own grisly death, smashed to bits on the frozen rocks below.
Nobody knows what really happened. All we know for sure is that the climbers continued their descent. They owed him that much at least – to survive.
The only evidence the team saw of Art Gilkey’s fate was a broken ice axe and some blood-stained rocks. His remains were not discovered for another forty years.
Years later, members of the team, including their leader Charles Houston, stated their belief that Gilkey had sacrificed himself in order to save his friends.
Heroes are born on mountains – and they often die on them as well.
*
It took another five days for the team to reach base camp. They were weighed down and beaten, from frostbite, hypothermia, grief and exhaustion. But, finally, they made it.
Before they left base camp, the survivors erected a small cairn to the memory of Art Gilkey, and held a simple service of thanksgiving for his courage and life. Today, it is the burial site for many climbers who have died on K2.
And to me it’s a memorial to more than just one man. It’s a memorial to an ideal of loyalty and companionship. Pete Schoening’s belay turned him into a mountaineering icon, but he always downplayed his achievement, as great team players and heroes tend to do.
Charles Houston would later say of the members of that expedition that ‘we entered the mountain as strangers, but we left it as brothers’.
And Reinhold Messner, one of the greatest mountaineers ever, got it in a nutshell. The team might have failed, he said, but ‘they failed in the most beautiful way imaginable’.