Now that K2 (8,611 m) has also succumbed to high-mountain tourism, it is hard to imagine the tremendous stories of bravery, betrayal and pain perpetrated here in 1939 and 1954, the date of the first ascent of the second highest mountain on the planet. As Nazi Germany set out to conquer Europe, Fritz Wiessner, a German chemist and mountaineer with dual American citizenship, became obsessed with K2. On July 19, 1939, night began to fall when he himself and the Nepalese who accompanied him, Pasang Lama, were barely 240 meters from a slope that they were already caressing. They did not carry artificial oxygen but the weather was perfect, they were not exhausted and they only had a few simple slopes of snow left to reach the top. But Pasang, fearful of the demons of the night, stood his ground: he would not attempt the summit until the next day, in sunlight. Understanding and tolerant, Wiessner agreed to turn around. He would regret it all his life, unable to imagine at that moment the chain of misfortunes that would forever alter his existence.
The US expedition of 1939 was to be the definitive one, after one held in 1938 to survey the mountain and set the Abruzzo Spur route as the best option for ascent. Wiessner was a great climber and mountaineer. He discovered the United States on business and finally decided to stay, passing on to the local community everything he learned in the Alps. His strength and technical ability was extraordinary for the time. He would be the leader of an expedition to K2 that, however, lacked funding. Each of the climbers paid for the adventure out of his pocket, which he placed before wealthy guys than real climbers. Wiessner set out on an expedition with what was really a group of clients, including Dudley Wolfe, as rich as he was unskilled in climbing, as willful as he was limited, as enthusiastic as he was dependent. The approach march to the giant of the Karakoram lasted a month (today, a week), but once on-site, the supply chain for food, gasoline, and miscellaneous material for the many high-altitude camps worked reasonably well. Until everything went to hell for reasons that, even today, have not been absolutely clear.
Ironically, a logistical problem also led (during the successful Italian expedition to K2 in 1954) to one of the most unpleasant affairs in Himalayan history. Then (and now), the Sherpas were in charge of supplying the high altitude camps with what was necessary to inhabit the mountain and remain sheltered in the event of a storm. If now the Sherpas rule K2 (this year they have set the ropes to record 200 peaks in the same season, more than half of those achieved in 68 years), in 1939 the western mountaineers ruled. But then the most qualified leader, Fritz Wiessner, reached a high point on K2 from which the summit was within reach: while he launched his summit attack, below 7,500 meters the machinery stopped working. Where the Sherpas should have continued to provide resources, they began to disappear. The orders were badly given, or were not understood. The fact is that the umbilical cord that joined the fields to each other was cut. Upstairs, isolated without knowing it, were Wiessner, Lama and Wolfe. Meanwhile, the high altitude camps that remained below were systematically dismantled.
In 1954, the last high-altitude camp also disappeared: when the young Walter Bonatti and the high-altitude porter Mahdi arrived at the agreed point to transport supplies and oxygen bottles vital for the summit attack, neither Lino Lacedelli nor Achille Compagnoni were there, Not your store. These last two had placed it higher up, out of sight, and the night made it impossible to find it. Bonatti was hoarse to locate them, and when he did, the screams he heard left him petrified: they ordered him to leave the charges right there and leave. There was no room for anyone else in the store. Unable to descend without light, Bonatti and Mahdi suffered a terrible night in the open, at an altitude of 8,000 meters. Mahdi, severely frozen (he would lose all his fingers and toes), survived thanks to the help of Bonatti, who never recovered from this inhuman betrayal despite becoming the most iconic mountaineer who ever lived.
The confidentiality agreement that he had signed when enlisting in the expedition prevented him from denouncing the criminal attitude of Lacedelli and Compagnoni, but years later he told his truth and showed in passing that in the conquest of K2 both used oxygen despite swearing that they had not. . Yet this and other equally unfair matters destroyed Bonatti’s confidence in men.
For Fritz Wiessner there was no second attack to the top: Pasang Lama lost his crampons and without them he was defenseless on the mountain. It was therefore necessary to wait 11 years for the human being to finally climb a peak of more than 8,000 meters: it was the Annapurna, an honor that France took. Both began their retreat and, to their surprise, in the field located at 7,700 meters they found Dudley Wolfe, who had been alone for a week and waiting for supplies from below. With nothing to light the stove with, he hadn’t eaten or drunk for days and his condition was deplorable. To reach the next field, at 7,500 meters, they bordered on tragedy: Wolfe couldn’t give more of himself. Hoping to find supplies and Sherpa workers down the mountain, Wiessner and Pasang settled Wolfe and went out, weak, looking for help. They wouldn’t see anyone until they reached base camp, more dead than alive. Here begins the crossing of accusations. Wiessner accused Tony Cromwell, another member of the expedition, of conspiring to end his life, and Cromwell accused him of abandoning Wolfe, for whom three rescue attempts were organized. The last one managed to place three Sherpas above 7,000 meters that no one saw again. Wolfe also disappeared.
Wiessner was treated as little more than a plague sufferer in America, a suspicious German. The figure of him was only rehabilitated many years later, in 1956, after narrating in a book the mysterious matter of the dismantling of the fields. Jack Durrance, another member of the expedition, explained after Wiessner’s death (1988) that it was Cromwell who had the high-altitude fields collected… but the Sherpas did not understand that those above 7,000 meters should remain functional. And Fritz Wiessner never got out of his mind the moment when he unknowingly turned his back on history and decided not to reach the top, sure as he was then that dawn would bring him the glory that the night demons took away forever.
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