“In the mountaineering literature of the 1970s, bruised feelings and simmering resentments were beginning to replace frostbite and hypoxia as the signature ailments of high-altitude mountaineering.” Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver, Fallen Giants
In the early 1970s, the slopes of K2 were still relatively untouched. Since the first attempt by a British team in 1902, the number of expeditions to climb it could still be counted on fingers and toes, and only two men, Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli in 1954, had reached the top.
Although Italians had first set foot on the summit, two heroic and ultimately tragic expeditions in 1939 and 1953 meant that American climbers still considered it to be their mountain. After a German-American expedition made an unsuccessful attempt in 1960, no one attempted K2 again for fifteen years.
In 1974, when the Pakistan government reopened the Karakoram for climbing after a period of closure, Americans were among the first to return. A reconnaissance team identified the Northwest Ridge as a possible route to the summit, and in 1975 a full assault was launched.
In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods by Galen Rowell
In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, Galen Rowell’s classic account of the 1975 American expedition to K2 had been sitting on my shelf for 17 years. The book had a reputation as a tale of strife, failure and endless bickering and I never quite felt in the mood for reading it. I finally summoned up the courage in December last year.
The 1975 American K2 expedition was led by Jim Whittaker, who was invited to lead it by Jim Wickwire, the brains and driving force behind the project. Whittaker was an American mountaineering icon, a 6’5″ giant of a man who had made the first US ascent of Everest in 1963.
By most standards, the expedition can reasonably be described as a complete failure from start to finish, although kinder people might argue that discovering the Northwest Ridge to be unclimbable was an achievement of sorts. Realising that an account of the expedition on its own would be less than inspiring, Galen Rowell weaved K2’s mountaineering history into the narrative. He alternates chapters about the 1975 expedition with accounts of the expeditions of Conway (1892), Eckenstein (1902), the Duke of Abruzzi (1909), Houston (1938), Wiessner (1939), Houston again (1953) and Desio (1954). This has the effect of making the early history seem like a subplot without which the 1975 expedition could never have happened.
Much of the failure was self-inflicted. Before they even left American shores, there were arguments between team members. One member was fired because some of others suspected that they might not get along with him on the mountain. Whittaker invited his wife Dianne Roberts as expedition photographer, and then his twin brother Lou, hoping the expedition will heal a long-lasting rift between them. Lou responded by immediately questioning Dianne’s competence to be a member of the climbing team.
Jim Whittaker’s heavy-handed and secretive decision making was partly responsible for some of the issues. In Skardu, Pakistan, three team members were put on the naughty step for going off on a sightseeing trip while others spent the day packing supplies. Schisms opened, tempers flew, and Dianne became isolated, not only as the only woman on the team, but as a relatively novice climber among seasoned pros. The team divided into two groups: the ‘Big Four’ of the two Jims, Lou and Dianne, who appeared to make all the decisions without consulting the others, and the rest.
Their trek along the Baltoro Glacier to base camp was constantly delayed by porter strikes. These strikes still plague expeditions in the present day. In 1975 they were so severe that it took the team weeks longer than they’d planned to reach base camp. There was a moment of theatre when Jim Whittaker burned a handful of rupees to convince the porters that if they didn’t move then they wouldn’t be paid.
Competition between team members arose on the trek in. They vied to carry the heaviest load and move quickest between camps. This wasn’t only due to the well-known climbers’ trait of one-upmanship but because they suspected (correctly, as it turned out) that Jim Whittaker was already deciding who should be in the summit party.
As the expedition progressed, this schism between the Big Four and the rest became wider and wider. The ‘Two Freds’ (Fred Stanley and Fred Dunham) suspected from the start that they had been recruited as foot soldiers in the Whittakers’ and Jim Wickwire’s quest for glory. They became so alienated from the leadership that they refused to take any further part in the expedition.
The pantomime villain of In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods is Lou Whittaker, who comes across as a playground bully. There is a photograph of him wrestling Fred Dunham. After Lou threatened to ‘deck’ him for taking too long to get up, Dunham recorded in his diary that ‘there is only one way to handle a guy like Lou who shoves his weight and size around… he should end up with an ice axe in the back of his head or a bullet between the eyes. There is no other way for a smaller person to get vengeance or justice.’
By contrast, when faced with mutinous team members, Jim Whittaker mellowed and showed more kindness than his brother. Galen was mocked by Lou for pulling out of a load carry on the Northwest Ridge because he felt feverish. ‘If you wanted to climb K2 as much as we do, you wouldn’t stay back for every little thing,’ Lou told him. By that stage in the expedition, several team members had already been diagnosed with bronchitis. When Jim Whittaker arrived later in the day and found Galen still in his sleeping bag, he ordered him to descend immediately for rest.
There were times when the drama felt surreal. The climb was eventually abandoned at the modest altitude 6,700m, after they crested a pinnacle only to find that the rest of the Northwest Ridge was impassable. They left base camp in a hurry when one of their high-altitude porters, Akbar, became seriously ill with peritonitis. As Akbar awaited death or evacuation by helicopter at Concordia, Galen received an unusual package from one of the mail runners. He had learned of his father’s death by mail earlier in the expedition, many days after it had happened. Then, as they were leaving, he received a box containing his father’s ashes to scatter on the slopes of K2.
The arguments and recriminations continued on the trek out. Galen admitted that they were not friends by the time the expedition ended. But there was one further twist. A few months after returning to America, rumours emerged that the whole expedition had been arranged as a front for the CIA. They’d had no intention of climbing the mountain; the sole purpose of the expedition had been to plant a listening device on the Chinese border. The rumours were nonsense and they had the effect of reuniting the team in defiance.
The Last Step by Rick Ridgeway
When I reached the end of In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, I realised that the story wasn’t complete. It wasn’t the end at all; merely, as Churchill would have said, the end of the beginning.
The Americans returned to K2 in 1978 to complete the job they had only finished beginning in 1975. Moreover, there is a companion tale of strife, failure and endless bickering, containing all the acrimony of the first volume and more.
The book in this case is The Last Step by Rick Ridgeway. As soon as I finished reading In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, I ordered a copy, and I read it as soon as it arrived. While the first book feels incomplete, The Last Step can be read as a standalone story. It’s significantly enhanced, however, if you read Galen Rowell’s book first, which becomes an introductory volume to set the scene.
The Last Step is a much better story than In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, not only because of the success of the expedition and its dramatic conclusion, but because Rick Ridgeway is a master storyteller who knows how to build tension and weave the different threads into a coherent tale.
Once again, the 1978 expedition was led by Jim Whittaker, but he had become a wiser leader who had learned from three years earlier. Jim Wickwire and Dianne Roberts also returned from the 1975 team. Dianne was a changed person too. She was a more experienced climber, and this time she knew that her role was that of a support climber rather than a potential summiteer. She was no longer the only woman on the team. To provide balance, Jim had invited husband and wife Terry and Cherie Bech as members of the climbing team, and Diana Jagersky as base camp manager.
The 1978 team had more Himalayan experience than their predecessors. Rick Ridgeway and Chris Chandler had both been on Everest, where Chris had reached the summit. Lou Reichardt and John Roskelley had both summited Dhaulagiri. Despite these qualifications, Jim Whittaker insisted that he would not be selecting summit teams until much later in the expedition, and he promised all team members a share of the leading. He hoped this would prevent the distrust that had occurred three years earlier.
The objective in 1978 was the Northeast Ridge. It was still unclimbed but a strong Polish team had attempted it in 1976 and narrowly failed to reach the summit. It was a known quantity that was much more feasible than the pinnacled Northwest Ridge of 1975, and the Poles had provided the Americans with a lot of useful information about its difficulties.
To begin with, things worked like clockwork, in marked contrast to 1975. The Pakistan government made all the porters sign contracts in the hope of preventing the strikes that had beset the ‘75 expedition. The team’s liaison officer Saleem gave rousing speeches every morning to imbue the porters with pride in their work. It seemed effective. There were no major porter issues and the team arrived in base camp far more quickly than they had in ‘75.
In the initial stages, there was no disharmony as the team established camps and made good progress to Camp 3. Rick’s evocative writing sets the scene. Specific, carefully worded passages help to provide a feel for expedition life. These include a tense and detailed description of crossing a crevasse, during which two team members on separate ropes fell in simultaneously and saw each other dangling upside-down over a gaping chasm. They include more mundane matters, such as slowly waking up and readying oneself inside a tent, goggles fogging up in a freezing snow storm and rendering you blind, wrapping cold fingers around a mug of hot chocolate that a teammate hands you back in camp, and forcing down freeze dried food that reminds Rick of Charlie Chaplin eating his shoe. More poetically, there is a passage where Rick and John Roskelley fix ropes along the knife-edge crest of the Northeast Ridge. As he gazes down into China from a world of snow, Rick is enchanted to see butterflies flutter over and perch on his rope.
But, as inevitably as disputes about oxygen, cracks started to emerge. Ironically, given what happened in ‘75, Jim’s more democratic leadership style led to problems of their own. An ‘A’ team emerged (Ridgeway, Roskelley, Reichardt and Wickwire), who were clearly much stronger and more determined than the others. Yet the ‘B’ team (who decided that the ‘A’ stood for ‘assholes’) still believed they should be given an equal share of the leading. Once again, team members started questioning the abilities of one of the women climbers, Cherie.
There was another potential pantomime villain in the form of John Roskelley, an old-school misogynist with no time for the weaker team members. He is described at least three times in the book as a ‘redneck’, including by Roskelley himself. But he is portrayed more sympathetically by Rick, who appreciated his strength and determination and became his climbing partner.
Instead, the book’s pantomime villain is Chris Chandler, a long-haired hippie who smoked weed and was Roskelley’s diametric opposite in terms of values and personality. Chandler was the most promising member of the ‘B’ team and became their figurehead. He was a vocal supporter of Cherie’s fitness to be on the summit team, but his relationship with her became a source of gossip and tension. With husband Terry’s blessing (who was confident their relationship was purely platonic), Cherie and Chris shared a tent for much of the expedition. Only when Chandler withdrew from the expedition, did the tensions between ‘A’ and ‘B’ teams melt away as the ‘B’ team accepted their fate as support climbers.
In any case, the mountain was the final judge. Of the ‘B’ team, only Terry Bech made it above Camp 5 as a support climber. With time running out, it took one final Herculean effort for the ‘A’ team to put themselves in position for a summit attempt.
Wickwire and Reichardt traversed across from the Northeast Ridge to the Abruzzi Spur to follow the classic route to the summit. They became the first Americans and only the third party ever to summit K2, but Wickwire was delayed on descent and was forced into an overnight bivouac that he barely survived. Meanwhile, after making an aborted attempt to finish the direct route up the Northeast Ridge, Roskelley and Ridgeway followed their partners around to the Abruzzi Spur and reached the summit the day after.
The expedition ultimately had a happy ending, but these bare details tell only part of the story. There was no shortage of tension as the ‘A’ team battled time and the weather to put themselves in position for the summit.
There was drama for the team at base camp as they trained their binoculars on the mountaintop and watched two tiny figures reach the summit. The celebrations lasted only a few minutes as they watched only one figure return. Reichardt had climbed without oxygen, and he realised that he would need to descend rapidly. Wickwire lingered on the summit to take photos, unaware that his teammates at base camp believed that he must have fallen and his climbing partner was racing for help. There was relief when his figure emerged again, but this didn’t last long. Darkness fell while he was still high on the mountain and they doubted if he could survive the night.
As eyewitness to the some of the expedition’s most dramatic moments, Ridgeway is the perfect narrator. His gift for storytelling has turned this true account of an ultimately successful expedition into one of the great mountaineering books.
The candid nature of his reporting came at a cost. Such a warts-and-all account is less likely to be written today, in an era when people are more sensitive to matters of privacy. Prior to the K2 expedition, Chris Chandler had been Rick’s climbing partner on many expeditions and one of his closest friends. Rick may have survived K2, but his friendship with Chris did not. When they met after the expedition, Chris entreated Rick not to mention his relationship with Cherie in the book; Rick refused, arguing that it was central to the story. It was certainly central to The Last Step, but whether it was central to the story of the first American ascent of K2 is more questionable.
The two men were never reconciled. Chris Chandler died on Kangchenjunga seven years later. His partner on that fateful climb was Cherie Bech.
