Savage Summit Read online

  JENNIFER JORDAN

  SAVAGE SUMMIT

  THE LIFE AND DEATH

  OF THE FIRST WOMEN OF K2

  Dedication

  To Charlie Houston

  and the women of K2,

  my heroes of the Himalayan world

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Map

  Introduction: Why K2?

  CHAPTER 1

  A Women’s History of K2

  CHAPTER 2

  The Persistent Pioneer

  CHAPTER 3

  A Spectacular Summit

  CHAPTER 4

  The Black Summer

  CHAPTER 5

  Our Mountain of Destiny

  CHAPTER 6

  The Black Summer’s Final, Terrible Toll

  CHAPTER 7

  The Pioneer Perishes

  CHAPTER 8

  Finally, Another Survivor

  CHAPTER 9

  Of Mothers and Mountains

  CHAPTER 10

  One Day as a Tiger

  CHAPTER 11

  The Legacy Is Sealed

  CHAPTER 12

  A Hero Is Found

  EPILOGUE

  The Price of Passion

  Author's Note

  Special Thanks

  Chapter Notes

  Selected Bibliography and Source Materials

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map

  INTRODUCTION

  WHY K2?

  It’s a logical question. K2 is not Everest, not many have climbed it, and almost no one knows where it is. And besides all that, why me? I’m a born and bred Yankee, worked most of my life reporting for Boston radio stations and magazines, and considered competing in ultra running trail races and the Ironman triathlon adventure enough. Not exactly your typical stepping-stones to the unspeakably dangerous and hypoxic world of 8,000-meter peaks that sit halfway around the world in Nepal, Tibet, and Pakistan. But that’s exactly where I ended up.

  My journey to K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, sitting weeks from civilization on the Pakistan-China border, began years earlier when I read Into Thin Air. Like millions of readers who learned the excruciating reality of high-altitude climbing through the story of Mount Everest’s deadliest storm in 1996, I suddenly found myself fascinated with that exotic and ruthless world at 8,000 meters, or 26,000 feet, an altitude above which life begins to die. Who were these strange souls who sought to enter that so-called Death Zone, and why did they revel in the literally mind-blowing experience of having millions of brain cells die in minutes?

  I also became fascinated by the roles that women played in this high-altitude game of life and death and wondered how their experience differed from that of their male teammates. In my reading of Jon Krakauer’s brilliantly told story, I sensed a certain bias, an agenda, concerning the women on the mountain that year, particularly Sandy Hill Pittman, whose wealth and personality he spent a lot of ink chastising, as if being arrogant and rich somehow made her less of a climber. Further, while he seemed to point a finger of blame at Pittman for being a client who survived, he made heroes of the guides who died, and of one guide in particular who in my estimation made the worst errors of the day by climbing past his own turnaround time and pulling an exhausted client with him.

  Why, I wondered, had Krakauer chosen to single out Pittman for vilification and not the men whose choices were, at the least, questionable, and did that bad air permeate the high-altitude experience for other women climbers?

  So I kept digging, not knowing what I was looking for but somehow feeling I was missing the story. Then in 1998 I found it.

  “Chantal Mauduit just died on Dhaulagiri. She’s the last one,” Charlotte Fox said.

  We were sitting on Fox’s back porch in Aspen, the afternoon summer sun hot on the terra-cotta tiles, sipping perfectly steeped ice tea and talking about her experience as a survivor of the 1996 disaster on Everest. She had been looking through a climbing magazine searching for an article I should read when she saw Mauduit’s obituary.

  “The last one what?” I asked, embarrassed to be so obviously clueless.

  “The last woman who made it off K2 alive. She just died on Dhaulagiri in Nepal,” Charlotte said, pausing to look at me to see if I had made the connection. “K2, the mountain? Now all of the five women who’ve climbed it are dead.”

  I didn’t know who Mauduit was, or even where this K2 was, but I knew my mind and soul had had a sea change. My questions veered from women mountaineers in general to the women of K2. Why had so few women climbed it? Who were they? And most crucially, how could none of them have survived?

  Soon I would learn that K2, at 28,268 feet (8,616 meters), is second out of the fourteen peaks in the world that rise above 8,000 meters, the height against which all other mountains are measured. Everest is, of course, first, but even though eight climbers had died there that one day in 1996, it seemed that toll was nothing compared to K2’s track record. By the end of the 2003 climbing season, nearly 2,000 had climbed Everest, but fewer than 200 had climbed K2 in the same period. While Everest had suffered 180 deaths, K2 had seen 53—9.4 percent versus nearly 27 percent. Between K2’s unrelenting 45-to 65-degree slopes, brutal weather, and general lack of high-altitude porters to carry oxygen and heavy loads high on the mountain, it suffered few fools and almost no clients. It simply didn’t have the infrastructure for such hubris. As a result, it tended to attract the best climbers, and that made its death rate all the more remarkable. I had thought Everest was dangerous, but I was learning a whole new definition for the word lethal.

  An early climber took one look at the far-off pyramid and declared it an unconquerable mountain of all “rock and ice and storm and abyss.” In 1953 it was dubbed “the Savage Mountain” by a team of young American climbers after one of their friends perished high on the mountain, and it’s continued to earn the distinction. At the beginning of the 2004 climbing season, nearly a half-century since an Italian team first made the summit in 1954, only five women had reached its summit (compared to ninety female ascents of Everest). Three of them died on their descent, and the two who made it off alive died shortly thereafter while climbing other 8,000-meter peaks. And in 1998 Mauduit became the last.

  In the few years following that sunny Aspen afternoon, my research continued, and I came to know K2 as I knew few things in life. Over time I felt a love and tenderness for the five women who climbed it that journalists often gain for their research subjects. I learned that the first woman to climb K2 in 1986 remains unsurpassed with a climbing record of summiting eight—perhaps nine—8,000-meter peaks. I read that before another woman of K2 left Base Camp for her fatal summit bid, she had answered letters to her two young children eager for their “mummy” to return home—couldn’t she come home now? I had spoken to another woman’s brother and learned that his younger sister had a love for life that often made her jump without looking for a safety net, a carefree—and some charged careless—joie de vivre that defined her life. And I had learned that another woman of K2 had already seen six deaths on the mountain by the time she made her summit bid during the mountain’s deadliest climbing season in 1986. Her death would be among the year’s staggering toll of thirteen.

  Who were these pioneering climbers, and why did they choose a life on the edge of death? Why did they die, and why did one mountain claim so many of them? How did they make the decision to leave family, husband, and children to venture into the world’s highest and most deadly playground? Did their gender have a hand in their deaths? And while the mountain may not have cared that they were women, were there other forces at work that did?

  Grim and gruesome, these q
uestions haunted me, and I wanted to learn more than books and memoirs could provide. Plus, the books and memoirs were mostly about men; women mountaineers seemed to be a footnote in climbing history. I knew they deserved their own book and thought I might as well be the person to write it. And even though the very thought of it terrified me, I knew I had to travel to Pakistan and see the mountain for myself.

  Less than two weeks before my departure in May 2000, I went to hear David Breashears, the filmmaker who became a hero when he helped save the survivors of the 1996 Everest disaster, deliver the commencement address at Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, Vermont. As we walked to the garden where the ceremonies were held, David gestured to an elderly man walking with him and said, “Jennifer, if you’re on your way to K2, you have to meet this man.”

  We paused on the slate walkway, and the man turned to meet me. I found myself looking into blue eyes that positively danced with life. I didn’t need any more of an introduction.

  “Charlie Houston, I presume,” I said, extending my hand. “I’m Jennifer Jordan, and I leave for K2 in two weeks. I’m honored to meet you.”

  Dr. Charles S. Houston led the 1938 and 1953 American expeditions to the mountain and has been called the grandfather of Himalayan mountaineering. Although it is a history often rife with ego, shame, and blame, Charlie remains universally loved and his expeditions heralded as “jewels in the crown of Himalayan climbing.”

  Not satisfied with formal introductions, he pushed my proffered hand aside and pulled me into a bear hug so tight I thought I could hear my ribs cracking.

  “My dear girl,” he said, “how lovely that you are going to my K2. Give that beautiful mountain my best, will you?”

  I promised I would and walked to my seat beaming, not only at having met a piece of history but also over knowing instantly that he would be in my life for as long as time would allow. When I left for the mountain, I remembered that hug and his pure delight that I would be experiencing a place that he clearly loved with all his heart.

  Unfortunately, my expedition was anything but delightful, lovely, or any other adjective that even suggests enjoyment. I traveled with a large American team to the mountain’s North Ridge in China. I had hoped to find myself among a team of rare souls who understood that they were entering what some called “the Cathedral of the Mountain Gods,” humbled to be among the world’s most sacred peaks. Instead, it was a sad and disparate group of warring and unhappy egos, each with an opposing agenda and none with the ability to lead the group. We returned to the States after four wretched months in each other’s company, the climbers without having achieved the summit, and I nowhere near having gotten my book. When I visited Charlie soon after my return, he looked at me with a devilish grin: “My dear, it really is your own fault for going to such a remote place with a group of strangers.” He was right, of course, but it didn’t help my sense of disappointment.

  Then, two years later, I found myself again approaching the unbearably flawless mountain, this time with a small team of close friends, all talented climbers and gentle souls. When we turned for home nearly three months later, again not having achieved the summit, we were nonetheless better friends and more seasoned climbers than when we had left. I finally had my book.

  Well, almost.

  I’ve heard writers say that a book “just wrote itself.” Well, not this one. If anything, it got harder to write as each day progressed, each new detail was learned, and each woman slowly became unveiled to me. In the beginning each was merely a cardboard cutout: climber, mother, daughter, lover. But as I found and interviewed their parents, spouses, children, siblings, friends, biographers, and rivals, their two-dimensional lives exploded with all the Technicolor and controversy in which we all live. Add to that tumultuous tableau the messy world of mountain climbing with its hypoxic and often self-serving memory of life and death at 8,000 meters and you have a recipe for tabloid trauma at its vivid best.

  But it wasn’t until I actually began to write down the stories of the five women of K2 that I realized just how tough a task I had undertaken. For one thing, they were all dead and their histories poorly recorded—so poorly recorded in fact that I was unable to find a single picture of any of them on the summit of K2. Either the cameras malfunctioned or the women were lost. In addition to scant and scattered information, I didn’t become obsessed with these women with salacious intent, and so my job became even more difficult as I learned that each had hardly been a naive Girl Scout. Like most of us, they had ghosts and demons in some very crowded closets. Writing the lives of these complex, complicated women honestly and objectively, while maintaining a dignified distance from their very personal and often very troubled histories, became an arduous task.

  I also wondered how I would comprehensively write about personalities that not only went to the edge of death but lived there, flirting with its oddly tantalizing edge for days, even months, at a time. I was near that edge of death when I fell into a deep crevasse on the north side of K2, and rather than stare in calm wonder at my very possible and imminent death, every fiber of my being screamed, “OHGODOHGODOHGOD! I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M GOING TO DIE HERE! NOT HERE, NOT NOW!” There was certainly no peace, no acquiescence, no gentle surrender. And when I watched other men and women on K2 dance on that edge, daring it and themselves to get closer with every step, I was paralyzed with fear, as if the panic they should have felt had somehow transplanted itself into my own heart, freezing it cold.

  But I realized that even if I could not entirely understand their pleasure in almost courting death, I could at least hope to convey their sense of life. In doing so, I have employed a tactic used effectively by many historians, most notably Sebastian Junger in The Perfect Storm, and I did so for his same reason: re-creating the actual dialogue of the dead is often impossible with few or no living witnesses of the event. Therefore, in the pages that follow there are two forms of spoken word: one in quotes, which I gathered firsthand from journals, books, and witnesses, and the other in italics, representing thoughts and conversations that are based on fact but are not exact quotes.

  Let me say at the beginning that this is not the end. As this book was going to press, a sixth woman, Edurne Pasabán of Spain, reached the summit of K2 and made it down alive, although barely. (See Author’s Note.) While her accomplishment is enormous, my focus had been and remains the five who came before her as it is their stories, their lives, and their deaths which have consumed me for the better part of six years. So here you have my best attempt at bringing these women into your life. I hope my account is honest, straightforward, and compelling. But in no way do I claim to be the last word, the omniscient word, or the absolute truth about who they were, how they lived, and how they died. I aim simply to share with you the stories of five remarkable women who chose to live at the edge of death and all of whom ultimately died there.

  This book is for them.

  Wanda Rutkiewicz (1943–1992) summited K2 in 1986.

  Liliane Barrard (1948–1986) died on her descent of K2 in 1986.

  Julie Tullis (1939–1986) died on her descent of K2 in 1986.

  Chantal Mauduit (1964–1998) summited K2 in 1992.

  Alison Hargreaves (1962–1995) died on her descent of K2 in 1995.

  CHAPTER 1

  A WOMEN’S HISTORY OF K2

  The chief joy is the varied and perfect exercise, in the midst of noble scenery and exhilarating atmosphere. The peak utters a challenge. The climber responds by saying to himself, I can and I will conquer it.

  —ANNIE SMITH PECK (1850–1935)

  For most of the modern age, “woman climber” was an oxymoron. Women were almost without exception wives, widows, prostitutes, royalty, or slaves. But sometime during the late eighteenth century, when the first woman cinched a rope around her waist and lashed her boots into bear claw–shaped steel crampons to climb up ice walls and steep snow slopes, war was declared on the status quo. From the time of those earliest rock and alpine pioneers, wo
men have had to deal with their gender as well as the mountains in order to climb. Whether it has been climbing with the danger and annoyance of twenty-two-pound skirts and the inconvenience of monthly menses or negotiating the power struggles with their male teammates, porters, guides, and officials, women have had very different experiences than men in the climbing world.

  Early explorers of the sea, desert, jungle, Arctic, and mountains were mostly men whose cultures and personal fortunes allowed them such freedom. The few women of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries who had the financial and societal independence to venture beyond the narrow confines of the day found getting to the mountains a difficult feat. Not only did men invite other men to attempt the then-unclimbed peaks around them, but many resented the intrusion of women into their very male pursuits, as if the presence of women somehow diluted the fun, the danger, and the escape of their adventures. If it had been possible, one can imagine those early men posting a “No Girls Allowed” sign above the mountains.

  The early female mountaineers also faced resistance and umbrage from deep within the cultured societies of London, Paris, and Boston, which had difficulty embracing the display of women, in britches or skirts shortened to their calves, ropes pulled tight around their bodies, climbing and sleeping on mountains, with men! Further, it was one thing for men to risk death in their lofty pursuits, but for women who “belonged” safely at home caring for the children, it was practically blasphemous.

  But the women pioneers of rock and ice persevered through their culture’s indignation and scorn, first ascending Mont Blanc in 1808 (although barely, as Marie Paradis, exhausted and quite undone by her efforts, begged her companions to throw her into the nearest crevasse to put her out of her misery), the Matterhorn in 1871, and finally the world’s mightiest peak, Mount Everest, in 1975. With every rope they suffered second-guessing, petty jealousy, and recrimination, not to mention the resentment of men who felt challenged when women achieved the same feats that they had heralded as pushing the limits of what the human body could endure. After all, if a mere woman could do it, how dangerous could it be?