Free K2 by Ed Viesturs

commission indefinitely.
    Until that moment, I don’t think I’d realized how much I was counting on our two-man teamwork. I’d always envisioned Scott and I working our way up the mountain together, then embracing on the summit. Now, as I brooded in the night, I faced the real possibility that if I got to the top of K2, it might be with some other partner. I had begun to connect with a couple of the stronger climbers on my team, Neal Beidlemanand Charley Mace, as well as Hall & Ball. Perhaps they would be the ones I could go to the summit with. Yet at this point in the expedition there wasn’t another guy on our team I thought of as a truly close friend, and there sure wasn’t anybody I trusted the way I trusted Scott.
    In the absence of any real leadership from Vlad, the rest of us decided we needed to designate someone as climbing leader. During one of our mealtime meetings, with Vlad absent, off doing his own thing, we took a vote, and to my surprise, I got elected. Right away, I tried to put some semblance of order into the logistics—figuring out who would carry what supplies to which camp, and so on. There was no telling the Russians what to do, however. The only loyalty they had was to one another, and as far as I could tell, there wasn’t even much of that.
    Another thing that disturbed me was that the Russians seemed willing to climb in really dangerous conditions. In turn, they sometimes acted as if the rest of us were wusses. One day when Vlad got back to camp, he turned to me and asked, “Why do you not go today?”
    “Because I thought there was tremendous avalanche danger,” I answered. I didn’t say out loud what I really thought:
Dude, we’re not suicidal like you!
    I wondered at the time whether this propensity for really hanging it out there was part of a peculiarly Russian style in the Himalaya. On Everest in 1990, I’d climbed with Soviets on Jim Whittaker’s International Peace Climb. There, the Russians had also seemed willing to climb in worse conditions than the rest of us. They tend to be highly competitive within their own ranks, as they gain status and honor in their home country with every success they achieve. On later expeditions, though I wasn’t partnering with Russians, I noticed that they often acted in a similar way. Right or wrong, they have their own way of winning a prized spot on an expedition, and once on the team they all silently push one another very hard.
    During the ten days after Scott dislocated his shoulder, the weather was consistently bad. My optimism took a solid hit. Even though I was the nominal climbing leader, I couldn’t bully some of the others into pulling their own weight. Instead, I just got frustrated and grouchy—and my diary reflects that mood.
    July 14: Our goal is to establish CIII, finish fixing to CIII & pick up all the shit between CII & CIII. That’s a major problem on these trips. Most people only make half carries & dump shit all over the place!
    July 15: Always anxious only because got lots to do & I have to get people organized. I wanted to work with Rob to finish fixing into CIII cause he knows where it should go so I waited for him. By 7:30 he still wasn’t ready so I took off alone.
    Same day: Got down to CII at 4 P.M. after a lot of raps [rappels]…. Got to CII and Alex, Gnady and Dan arrived. A full-on cluster fuck! They all wanted to sleep @ CIII tomorrow as did we. They don’t even give us room to breathe! I was pissed off!
    We simply didn’t have enough tents for all of us to sleep at Camp III. Our climbing logistics still needed some fine-tuning.
    In my frustration, in the privacy of my diary, I recorded my own nicknames for some of the other climbers. The Swedish team were “sheep.” A pair of brothers whose last name rhymed with my epithet became “the weenies.” But my bitching in the diary was more than sour grapes. I really thought that our so-called team effort was held together by less than a shoestring.
    July