Rick Ridgeway

How have I not read this before? This is amazing! There's a lot of conflict in this expedition, and Ridgeway doesn't shy away from describing it. Of course, it is from a biased perspective, but Ridgeway does include multiple climbers' viewpoints. The climbing itself is also incredible, and well described.

> Most of the subsequent attempts were made by Americans—in 1938, in 1939, and again in 1953. Like Everest, which was called a "British" mountain because Britons had made most of the early attempts to climb it, K2 was an "American" mountain. But unlike the British, who in 1953 became the first to climb Everest, the Americans missed their chance: in 1954, an Italian team made the first ascent of K2. … I had set out to lead a successful expedition to the second highest mountain in the world, and I wouldn’t feel satisfied until we completed what Americans had first set out to do in 1938. There now had been five American failures in a row (including a joint German–American expedition in 1960).

> For years I had been friends with the Kennedy family, and I asked Senator Ted Kennedy for help. He said he would write Prime Minister Bhutto and see if there was anything that could be done. On New Year’s Day, 1977, I received a letter from the Pakistan Embassy saying their government, as a special case, had allotted our expedition, as well as the British, permission to try K2 in 1978. The only condition was that we agree to follow the British by a few weeks to avoid logjamming on the approach march. We were on for 1978!

> The other possibility was the northeast ridge. The Poles had nearly reached the summit on this ridge in 1976, but had been turned back only seven hundred feet from the top when threatening weather and pending nightfall forced them to retreat. It was no doubt a less steep route than the west ridge, but it had the disadvantage of being very long. At one point, the ridge maintains the same altitude for nearly half a mile, and because it is knife-sharp, it would be a problem to haul equipment across to the upper camps.

> On Everest, expeditions normally hire small armies of Sherpas to help carry loads to the upper camps, allowing more climbers to reach the summit. But in the Karakoram there are no Sherpas. We had four Hunzas with some climbing ability and a little experience, but by and large, the job of hauling loads would be ours alone.

> We offered him a handful of M&M's. He took a few, set them in his lap, then picked one up and examined it. Very carefully, he peeled off the hard candy coating, again examined the chocolate core, then tasted it. He smiled and looked at us. Laughing, we taught him how to eat M&M's whole

> Every time the mail came, he first arranged his wife's letters in chronological sequence, then before opening them said: "Well, let’s see if I’m still married." John

> "I didn't know about any meeting. There was a meeting?" "Lou, we told you five times there was a meeting. You feeling O.K. these days?" Lou eventually figured out the joke, but apparently not without worrying he might be suffering from brain damage.

> The year was 1969, the scene the first American attempt to climb Dhaulagiri, and by a new and difficult route. The team was a selection of some of America's best mountaineers. Eight of the team were pushing the route up a glacier at the base of the east ridge. A fog settled, minimizing visibility, and suddenly in the distance they heard the unmistakable roar of an avalanche. Everyone took shelter; Lou found only a change in the slope—a hummock—to hide behind. The avalanche hit, and he felt his back pelted with ice debris. Then it cleared, and all was quiet. Lou looked around, and slowly he realized the extent of the tragedy. He was the only one alive; all seven of his companions had been killed. It seems safe to say most climbers would have hung up their ice axes and considered such miraculous escape as divine intervention, a celestial message to give up climbing. Lou not only continued, but his next major expedition took him back to Dhaulagiri, to take care of unfinished business. After reaching the summit, his first eight-thousand-meter peak, he went to the summit of Nanda Devi in 1976 and was now on K2 in 1978. Lou was no ordinary man with ordinary drives; he had some kind of devils running around inside, which apparently were exorcized—and then, I suspected, only temporarily—by brilliant accomplishment.

> Many of the team believed it had been a mistake for Jim not to order Chris to descend earlier, that he had not recognized, in this ignoble affair, the seeds of future disharmony. Perhaps had we all better communicated our concerns—perhaps, had Jim been more forceful in asking Chris and Cherie to descend—we could have forestalled the acrimony and animosity, the poison, that were to divide our team.

> "I just talked to Lou," Cherie said acidly. "I'm tired of hearing all this stuff about Terry being upset. Everyone whispering behind our backs. You're all bastards. Bastards, bastards, bastards."

> "John," I yelled. "You'll never believe this. There's a butterfly here sitting on the rope." "Yeah, there's more over here. They're flying in all around." I spotted two, three, four more. In no time there were a dozen, then twenty, then I counted thirty, a cloud of them flying up from some unknown place in China, rising on air currents up the mountain ridge

> We came to a section where we walked the narrow ridge crest, balancing on the edge of the knife—the exact border between China and Pakistan. The sun was setting behind K2. The low light caused a rare and dramatic phenomenon: our shadows were cast across the Godwin-Austen Glacier below, and as we moved our arms the shadows swept across miles of snow and rock. There was even more witchery, a rainbow halo around the shadow of our heads. Like Gods of Valhalla we ruled—for the few minutes the sun hovered at that acute angle—a land of ice and snow

> Before falling asleep I made a few notes, writing by headlamp, in my journal: When I'm next asked that frequent question, "Why do you climb?" the answer will be easy. All I will have to do is tell them what it was like climbing on K2 on July 30, 1978. That is if, with words, I can possibly come close to conveying a day so full of magic.

> One of the lessons one learns from hard climbing is how satisfying something simple can be. It is a valuable lesson; for the rest of your life, hot chocolate will have a special quality you will never forget. When I drink hot chocolate now, even if I am otherwise warm, I wrap my fingers tightly around the mug.

> "Incompetents. Why in the hell do I always end up with incompetents on these trips? There are so many good climbers who wanted to come on this expedition. Where are the Henneks and Schmitzes when I need them?"

> Doesn't everybody wish to leave some mark in their life? To tread across unknown territory? Cross new thresholds and frontiers? Perhaps this drive is only the result of some large ego. I'm not sure, but there has got to be more to it than that. I do know this: I have a burning desire to do this thing that has never been done. God only knows, though, I hope I can do it.

> I still thought him the most enigmatic person on the expedition—but a little better. While I was still puzzled by what inner drives could be responsible for his almost unbelievable motivation, I at least had had several weeks to observe the empirical results of those drives—such as forging on, when the rest of us were so close to turning back, to Camp V. It was as if his mind thought an idea through to its logical conclusion, then if that conclusion demanded of his body some phenomenal physical effort, the body simply obeyed orders. It was as if he lacked what, to the rest of us, was the main limiter of our efforts: feedback from the body to the mind. Lou's body just carried out the mind's orders, and from observing him there was no indication any signals got through the other direction.

> I was nearly at the hole into which Lou''s rope disappeared, with John and Chris still arguing heatedly. Just before I peeked over the lip, out popped Lou's head, like a seal surfacing, disoriented, through a hole in pack ice. His goggles were pushed down over his nose, his glasses under the goggles packed with snow. He could not see. Snow clung to his hair and beard. I stared at Lou, then down at Chris and John still yelling at each other, not even noticing that Lou had surfaced. It was like a Jerry Lewis comedy act. I started to laugh at the absurdity, which seemed to confuse Lou all the more.

> There was criticism that Jim had been premature in choosing the summit team, that he should have waited until later in the expedition. In retrospect, Jim no doubt agreed with this, since it could have helped prevent the estrangement of nearly half the team, but when he had made the selection—weeks earlier—we had been potentially only a few days away from a summit attempt. No one could have predicted the storms that had so wreaked havoc on that original schedule.

> Terry was still boiling mad. "I'll show them," he blazed. "Let's leave this mountain right now. We'll go down and cut all the ropes behind us, and burn all the tents. That will fix those sons-of-bitches." His eyes bulged madly. That finally provoked a response from Chris, who said calmly, "You can't do that, Terry. That would be murder, or at least manslaughter. People would die." "Yeah," Cherie agreed. "You've got to calm down." Terry regained composure. Diana returned to her tent and for a while there was peace. Terry was getting used to the idea of losing a day

> Lou felt, however, that if only one of us went to the summit without oxygen, it would "cheapen the ascent" for those who did use it; presumably he thought those using oxygen would end up doing all the trail kicking, but those without would get all the credit.

> If even the tiniest thing went wrong… But if we pulled it off, it would be the ultimate achievement of my life. That alone seemed worth the risk. Lying in the tent that evening, the vision of standing on the lonely summit of K2, gazing through rarefied air to an earth falling away in all directions, perched on the edge of space where the stars shine faintly in the daylight—that vision had a religious purity.

> the fiberglass poles of his two-person tent had frozen together, and unable to break them down, his only choice had been to partially collapse the tent and strap the unwieldy package, at least four feet by seven, across the top of his pack. Now he looked more like a dust-bowl farmer en route to California than an expert climber heading for the highest camp on K2.

> He had dozed, one hand steadying the pot full of water, and the billy tipped, spilling part of the water on his parka and his half-bag. He had intended to take both parka and half-bag with him to the summit, in case he had to bivouac, but now that they were wet, and in only minutes the water would change to ice, he knew he would leave the useless garments behind. That small incident of spilled water would nearly cost him his life

> I think most people's limits are a lot farther on than they believe. Consequently, they live life holding themselves back for fear of sailing off the earth. Once you realize this—that you have more reserves than you'd imagined—you’re free to explore and experiment, to take risks—emotional, mental, and physical—that you'd never dreamed of taking before. You're free to laugh at yourself when you fail (because in most of life, failure is not life-threatening, merely a learning experience) and relish the simplest of pleasures. … To hell with the mentality that would build fences around every cliff, outlaw hang-gliding, put a hard-hat on every cyclist. Life itself is less precious than the ability and freedom to live life to its fullest… (mehr)