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

Expedition Team
    When men climb on a great mountain together, the rope between them is more than a mere physical aid to the ascent; it is a symbol of the spirit of the enterprise. It is a symbol of men banded together in a common effort of will and strength against their only true enemies: inertia, cowardice, greed, ignorance, and all weaknesses of the spirit.
    —C HARLES S. H OUSTON
    The 1939 American K2 team: Back row, left to right: George Sheldon, Chappell Cranmer, Jack Durrance, George Trench; front row, left to right: Eaton Cromwell, Fritz Wiessner, Dudley Wolfe. (Courtesy of the George C. Sheldon Family)
    W ithin weeks of seeing Fritz at the slide show, Dudley had committed to going to K2. He booked his passage to Europe, sublet the penthouse, updated his will, and ordered the necessary equipment and clothes: a new ice axe, two pairs of leather mountaineering boots, the best steel crampons he could find, and layers of wool and silk underwear. What he hadn’t done was tell his family, in particular his older brother, Clifford.
    From the day the brothers had returned from World War I, Clifford had taken charge of running the family and its businesses. Their grandfather had been close to ninety at the time and Clifford was the eldest of his male heirs, so it had fallen to him. While Clifford and Dudley were close, loving brothers, they were very different men. Each was reserved and conservative, both politically and socially, but Dudley made adventure his life while Clifford donned a three-piece suit and polished brown leather shoes and made his life the family business. While he had no control over his younger brother, Clifford nonetheless judged Dudley’s lifestyle that of a playboy and not a serious man. When Dudley wrote of hunting in the hills above St. Anton and skiing down the couloirs of Chamonix, Clifford responded rather stiffly how “grand it must be to have the time for such exploits.” In the year before the expedition, Clifford had had enough of bearing the entire burden while Dudley played and had suggested that perhaps Dudley should spend some time with him on Wall Street and learn the family business.
    For his part, Dudley knew Clifford was right. His brother had taken on managing the estate and overseeing the books of the vast Smith fortune, and done a damn fine job of it, while he merely had his name on the door at their New York offices. And yet Clifford seemed to thrive on the spreadsheets and business pages of the New York Times as Dudley never had. Instead, he had tried to define himself through ever more daring challenges. Rather than let his poor eyesight allow him to sit out the war, he had gone to Europe and volunteered with the French Foreign Legion. In deciding to race across the Atlantic, he had shown the world it could be done in a sixty-foot schooner. In climbing in the Alps he had fought hurricane winds and traversed crevasses where only days before men had been lost.
    But Clifford did not consider his brother’s exploits a legitimate use of time, and as Dudley packed his bags for yet another adventure, this one nearly a year long by the time he would finally set foot back in America, he put off telling his brother of the expedition. Instead, he left Boston before the Christmas holidays giving the impression that he would return to Maine in time to put his new sleek, single-masted racing sloop, the Highland Light , in the water for the season, most likely by mid-May. With his ticket to Bombay already in hand, he had no intention of doing so.
    Before leaving for K2, and with a list of things to accomplish before he did, Dudley went to New York and hurriedly met with his attorney to draw up a new will. While in the city, he went to see his cousin, Clifford Warren Smith, Jr. Just as B. F. had feared, the man, now thirty-seven, was steadily killing himself with a fast life, well lubricated by alcohol, illegal drugs, and a revolving door of women, the latest being a Ziegfeld Follies