Free K2 by Ed Viesturs Page B

effort, but the more antsy climbers didn’t see it that way. I wrote in my diary that night, “Vlad took off with personal gear & Thor decided he was also gonna sleep @ CIV & try for the top. Yuk, yuk, yuk!”
    The only sensible thing was to go down. But still trying to be team players, Neal and I carried a tent, a rope, willow wands, and a snow shovel above Camp III toward where the route steepens to gain the Shoulder, in support of Vlad.
    I caught up to Vlad & told him it was no use to continue with zero vis[ibility] and snowing. He insisted on continuing so we gave him the tent and bailed. Thor & Chantal werealso more than happy to turn. (Vlad eventually camped right about where we left him! He learns the hard way.)
    Neal and I went back down to Camp III and spent the rest of the day debating what to do. As the weather progressively worsened, we made our decision and started descending with headlamps. By 9:30 that night, Neal and I got all the way down to base camp.
    For weeks now, I’d been almost constantly irritated by the lack of teamwork within our “team.” At base, I had a long, hard think about it, at the end of which I had what I called in my diary a “revelation.” “I’ve done more than my share of teamwork—fixing, hauling, etc.,” I wrote. “From now on I make my own moves/decisions.” I went on to jot down a possible scenario. If the weather settled and the snow conditions improved, on my own summit attempt I’d take a one-man bivy tent and a stove. I hoped Neal or even Scott could go with me, but I was ready to try for the top solo. Energized by this decision, I wrote in my diary, “It’s a good plan and the rest of the team can cluster fuck all they want! Hoka hay!”
    Meanwhile, at base camp Scott had been recuperating faster than anyone thought possible. We had helped him rig a special kind of shoulder brace that allowed him to use his injured arm for jumaring up fixed ropes but prevented him from raising that hand above chest level. On July 25—only thirteen days after he had dislocated the shoulder—he gave it a test run on a solo carry up to Camp I. He still felt a fair amount of pain, but, tough guy to the end, he figured he could climb all right with it. I was overjoyed to have my buddy back in action.
    Finally the weather was turning good. I still wasn’t in any hurry to dash up the mountain, because I knew that after all the storms, the snow conditions would be atrocious. But by July 27, a kind of anxious frenzy had taken hold of the climbers who were ambitious to get to the top. I was still entertaining thoughts about going solo on my own summit push, and the last thing I wanted to do was get railroaded into an attempt because others were chomping at the bit.
    Ambivalence is one of the hardest states of mind to handle on an expedition. That night, in a fit of vexation, I wrote in my diary:
    The weather
is
good. I’ll get ready to go & decide tonight…. So I’ll be ready to go whenever. Everyone keeps hounding me—when am I going up? Fuck, leave me alone! I don’t want to go with a huge pack of idiots. Too many people & they all want to go at once. We have so much time, but all of a sudden it’s got to be a mad dash.
    The Abruzzi Ridge may indeed be the easiest route on K2, but it’s no cakewalk. All through that summer on the mountain, I was acutely aware of a startling historical fact. The last successful ascent of the Abruzzi had come in 1986—and of the many climbers on the route that year, six had died on the descent. In the intervening years, 1987 through 1991, fourteen different expeditions had attacked the Abruzzi Ridge. Not a single climber from any of those fourteen parties had reached the summit.
    By 1992, only five Americans had climbed K2: Jim Wickwire and his three teammates by the northeast ridge in 1978, and Steve Swenson on the north ridge in 1990. No Americans had yet climbed the Abruzzi. Although that was not a major factor in my motivation, I couldn’t