Savage Summit

The Life and Death of the First Women of K2

Jennifer Jordan

• Publisher: Dey Street Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780060587161
• eBook ISBN:
  9780061753527
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Social Sciences

CHAPTER 6

THE BLACK SUMMER’S FINAL, TERRIBLE TOLL

Alpinism is the art of suffering.

—WOJTEK KURTYKA

Somewhere in between her now back-to-back expeditions, Julie found time to sell her autobiography, and she stole precious moments in early 1986 to write down her life story. In her short Himalayan climbing life, she had been on five expeditions, some lasting as long as four months, between 1982 and mid-1985, but as she wrote the final chapters of the book she lamented that the whole of 1986 was, at that point, “a horrible blank” on her calendar.

Again with a phone call, that blank became a dream. Could she leave for five months? Diemberger had booked a doubleheader filming job that would take them first to Nepal in the early spring and directly from there to their beloved K2 through the summer.

Julie left the Bothy in March 1986 for a trip that would first take her to Tashigan to film life in a remote mountain village and then immediately from Kathmandu to Pakistan for the third attempt she and Kurt would make at what they called “their” mountain. With her ride to the airport waiting, she and Terry had an emotional good-bye in the low doorway, both crying and holding their embrace longer than usual.

The expedition began well. When Julie and Kurt once again joined up with the “Quota 8000” Italian team, they found there were several members from their 1983 trip to the North Ridge of K2. Agostino Da Polenza, their leader from 1983, saw Julie across the Karachi airport, ran over, and swooped her up in an enormous hug, her feet dancing inches above the cement. Julie laughed and hugged him back, happy to be on a team that felt more like a family. When they reached Skardu several days later, they found the K2 Motel filled to overcrowding with climbers and spent their first night on the floor of the lobby with a collection of other unlucky climbers as the haunting prayers of the imam floated through the hotel from a nearby mosque. Julie and Kurt knew it was going to be a record year for climbers attempting K2, among them Wanda Rutkiewicz, the French couple Maurice and Liliane Barrard, and an assortment of British climbers whom Julie had met over the years as they came through her climbing shops. With so many teams heading into the Karakoram, finding an adequate supply of porters was sure to be a problem, so the Italians rose at 3:00 A.M. to get a jump on the competition. But Kurt woke with a nasty flu, and he and Julie decided to hang back and make the trek at their own speed, letting the teams battle it out ahead of them.

Julie loved the slower pace, traveling just a few miles a day, taking time to stop and marvel at the changing scenery they passed; the towering rock faces of the Cathedrals and Mustagh and Trango Towers, Masherbrum, the majestic Gasherbrum IV, a close runner-up to World’s Most Beautiful Mountain, until finally K2 itself appeared around the last corner. “I love this place,” she wrote Terry and said that it was her most enjoyable approach to the mountain yet.

As the teams settled themselves for their two-to three-month stay on the glacier, Julie noted where each would be climbing. Three other teams would join them on or near the South Southwest Ridge: a large Polish team that included three of the women they had met on K2 in 1984; a small American team; and Renato Casarotto, who, despite learning of his unexpected company on the route, would attempt to climb solo, something that had never before been done on K2. But if any man could do it, Casarotto had the experience, strength, and determination to pull it off.

Casarotto had been to the mountain once before in 1979 with Reinhold Messner, who had made it his very public goal to climb K2 via a so-called Magic Line, a route that closely followed the SSW Ridge. But once at the mountain, Messner abandoned his Magic Line and turned his energy toward the Abruzzi, as so many teams have since done once faced with the reality of alternative routes: unrelenting slopes, avalanche dangers, and 12,000 feet (3,660 meters) of unroped mountain. Perhaps feeling cheated out of the original goal, Casarotto was back to climb what was now his Magic Line. Joining him was his wife Goretta, a climber in her own right whose blond hair, blue eyes, full lips, and ivory skin reminded many of the models on the fashion runways of Paris and Milan. They were a popular and respected couple at Base Camp, although when their summer of expected solitude was shattered by the increasingly noisy rabble of other expeditions, they kept quietly to themselves in their large bluish-green tent.

The beauty and grace of Julie’s trek in and the early days at Base Camp quickly turned to disaster and anguish. Two weeks after Julie and Kurt arrived, Base Camp was awoken on June 21 by the thunderous roar of an avalanche. As climbers jumped from tents littered along the glacier, all eyes went to the mountain, where a fine dust of snow still hung in the air below the SSW Ridge. Was anyone climbing this morning? Did anyone get caught? Word soon spread: four Italians were higher on the route, safely at Camp III, but two Americans had been climbing low, below Camp I, when the avalanche broke off.

Al Pennington’s body was quickly found in the debris and buried the next day at the Gilkey Memorial. John Smolich was never found. Julie wrote Terry that their “glacier village is a mixture of emotions—extreme sadness, and worry for those still up.”

The avalanche began a chain of events whose actual toll will never be known. Deeming the SSW Ridge too dangerous, the large Italian team switched its route to the more popular Abruzzi, and Julie and Kurt switched with them. Launching their first summit attempt only days later, the Italians reached 7,850 meters before being turned back by storms. As they descended to Camp I they told Julie and Kurt of further bad news: the Barrards, who had made the summit on the 23rd, were missing. In an eerie foreshadowing, Julie had worried about the Barrards’ determination to have Liliane be the first woman to climb K2 and hoped they wouldn’t “kill themselves in the attempt.” It seemed they had. Liliane’s body was found at the base of the mountain nearly a month later, 10,000 feet (3,050 meters) below where she was last seen in the Bottleneck.

Julie and Kurt did not attend her service at the Gilkey, instead choosing to remain quietly in their camp. “It was like shying away,” Kurt wrote, “as if we tried to keep news of further disaster at bay. After these harrowing experiences of the Black Summer ’86, we could certainly have done one thing: forfeit our mountains of dreams. But nobody who has been up there takes this as a serious option. To fulfill their dreams, men frequently dare death and destiny.”

The mountain had claimed its third and fourth climbers of the Black Summer of 1986. But it had only gotten started.

Teams struggled physically and emotionally to get back on the mountain. The weather continued to roll in storm after storm, causing a pattern of climb, retreat, wait, climb, retreat, wait, which further sapped the energies and morale in the “village.”

Climbers dealt with the deaths and ever-escalating danger differently. Some simply abandoned their climbs, packing their expeditions back into bins and duffels and retreating down the glacier to home and safety. Others attacked their routes with new ferocity, setting out on their summit bids before their bodies were fully acclimatized, only to find themselves sucker-punched by the mountain and its weather; they returned to Base Camp exhausted and chagrined at their hubris. For Julie, the emotional warring was perhaps easier. Without a word, she would disappear through the ice towers that bordered both sides of Base Camp, taking only her samurai sword with her, and follow the silent meditations of aikido until she found her equilibrium. “I have two passions,” she said. “Mountains and the martial arts.” Then, when she was again able, she would share stories with the Casarottos, drink tea with the Brits, or play guitar and sing with the otherwise antisocial Austrians.

In many ways, Julie Tullis was the last person you’d expect to find on a Himalayan mountain, and some at Base Camp worried about her lack of high-altitude experience. Jim Curran, a jovial member of Al Rouse’s British expedition, was on board as a cameraman-climber hoping to film the first British ascent of K2. A friendly and well-liked climber from the Sheffield climbing scene, Curran carried extra weight from many a night in the local pubs that caused one of his blokes to comment: “Curran’ll never get a tan because the Save the Whalers’ll keep rolling him back in the water.” It was the kind of joke that in the hypoxic world of Himalayan climbing can cause a ripple of laughter to erupt for months. At Base Camp, Curran watched Julie with a sense of alarm: “I always felt that she’d slightly skipped quite a big chunk of mountaineering training in that she’d gone from being very much a rock climber to a Himalayan mountaineer without doing too much in between. So there was always a slight sort of question mark; where did she come from?” There was also the question of her drive on K2. “I think everyone on K2 in ’86 was quite aware that there was quite a gap between the grand old man, Kurt, and his protégée. It was a bit like a guide and a client. There was no question that Julie would never have in a month of Sundays been on K2 without Kurt being there. I suppose the idea was that Kurt’s experience would see her through. But every time she got away from the fixed ropes, like on Broad Peak, they seemed to be pushing it pretty near the margins.”

Climbers tend to be a superstitious lot, wearing the same lucky clothing climb after climb and never using words like “conquer” or “vanquish” in talking about climbing a mountain. Ed Viesturs, an American well on his way to achieving his goal of climbing all fourteen of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks without supplemental oxygen, said that you don’t linger on an 8,000-meter summit relishing your victory—you “tag the summit and run like hell” back down. Curran, watching Julie and Kurt in 1986, became increasingly wary of their lofty claims. “They both kept using this ‘K2 is our mountain of mountains’ as if they owned the thing, which I felt was a bit worrying that she’d got some sort of destiny to climb it. I tend to be fairly pragmatic, and I think if you start confusing climbing mountains with destiny you are playing with fire.”

July 16 dawned clear and calm, a perfect summit day in a place that rarely provided perfection. But for Renato Casarotto high on his route up the SSW Ridge, his climbing season was over. He was exhausted, and after a heroic effort of climbing alone and belaying himself to 8,300 meters (27,230 feet), he was calling it quits. He radioed Goretta at Base Camp; he was admitting defeat, retreating in the face of his own exhaustion and frustration with the route and the weather. As night fell he had almost reached Base Camp, a tiny speck in the vast expanse of the Filippi Glacier behind Base Camp, when he disappeared.

Diemberger, who had been watching Casarotto’s progress down through the crack-filled glacier, ran over to Goretta’s tent and urged her to raise Renato on the radio. Insisting that he couldn’t be that low on the mountain so soon, Goretta hesitated, but seeing the urgency in Diemberger’s face, she reached for the radio.

“Goretta, send help. I’ve fallen, tutto rotto, I’m dying. Come quickly,” Casarotto’s weak voice cracked over the radio. All broken, I’m dying. Alone and unroped, he had fallen 120 feet (37 meters) into the bowels of the glacier. Renato had been descending on his normal route, a route he had traversed countless times as he climbed and descended all summer. But this time, perhaps with his mind filled with frustration and defeat and all but jogging down through the Filippi Glacier, instead of jumping over a telltale snow bridge with its perilously thin ice, he had crashed through it and fallen into the narrow and deep crevasse.

Base Camp became a buzz of activity as people scrambled to find a rope for his rescue. Ironically, as more and more climbers aimed to ascend in the “fast and light” alpine fashion, finding a spare climbing rope in a Himalayan Base Camp was a difficult task. Finally, Diemberger and Julie grabbed their own rope and some ice screws and ran toward the glacier. Da Polenza, younger and faster, soon caught up with them, took their rope, and while keeping the injured Renato talking from his icy prison, sped through the maze of crevasses up to where his friend lay.

Gianni Calcagno, another member of the Italian team who had run up behind Da Polenza, descended into the crevasse and found Renato sitting against its wall. They embraced, and one can barely comprehend what Renato’s relief must have been when he saw Gianni’s smiling face join him in the deadly underworld. Water was all around him, and Renato complained that he was numb and that his head was cold. Although initially able to help pull himself out, he soon slumped on the rope, a deadweight that those above struggled to wrest out of the hole. When they finally got him to the surface, he was semiconscious, but he immediately collapsed onto the glacier, dead.

When Curran and his group reached where Renato lay, he remembered something “sinister” about the scene. “Beneath a sleeping bag, a plastic boot protruded. Bev [Dr. Bev Holt] carefully carried out his examination before replacing the bag, and in a choked voice confirmed what we already knew.” Curran looked at what only days before had been a robust man, his now pale arm emerging from his rolled-up sleeve, hanging limp and lifeless on the ice.

Wanda Rutkiewicz wept quietly. She had rushed up with the other climbers, sure that they could save him, determined that there wouldn’t be yet another death. Her summer of triumph had become one of darkest memories. She later wrote, “I can feel no pleasure at having reached the summit of K2…. I lost too many friends in 1986.”

Stunned climbers stood by the body, a dark shadow against the white snow, headlamps occasionally glancing off its rounded contours. As the first light of morning began to lighten the sky above Broad Peak, Agostino, sobbing, called Base Camp to tell Goretta.

Back in the Casarottos’ tent, Julie sat holding Goretta’s hand, watching her give calm instructions: her husband would be buried in the crevasse from which he had just been released. But before they lowered him, she wanted to come up to say her final good-byes. Hearing that she was on her way up, the climbers slowly made their way back to camp to give Goretta a measure of privacy in the midst of such sorrow. But weeping in Julie’s arms, Goretta realized that she wasn’t capable of watching her husband be lowered into his icy tomb, of seeing his body, once so strong and able, now broken and lifeless.

Curran started back down the glacier for Base Camp, turning back one last time in the waxing light. He saw two dark figures flanking a horizontal third. Suddenly there were just two. Renato had been returned to the crevasse, where it was hoped the body would remain in relative peace, not subjected to the constant grinding motion of the glacier’s surface. But like so many others over time, Renato’s body was disgorged and found by climbers in 2004, when it was once again quietly returned to its cold depths. For years after Renato’s death, Goretta returned to K2, a widow visiting her love’s gravesite. But by the mid-1990s she had stopped, having said all the good-byes and “I love yous” she could say. When his remains were found in 2004, Goretta again went back to the mountain, finally and thankfully to say good-bye to the body and the man she had been unable to say good-bye to eighteen years before.

Curran hoped the Black Summer had had its fill of death. Casarotto’s had been the worst he’d seen, and he’d seen a lot of death in his years of climbing. He just couldn’t imagine it getting worse. He prayed it wouldn’t.

It was July 17, and after gently rocking Goretta’s sobbing, inconsolable body for hours, Julie decided she had had enough climbing for one season. When Goretta finally fell into an exhausted slumber, Julie put pen to paper to tell Terry and the children that she was coming home. No more summit bids. No more death. While she had to remain on the mountain to film, she would not be climbing into harm’s way again. “I have buried so many good friends,” she wrote, “and so many good climbers have died, that I have little heart left to climb my mountains of mountains.”

But days later, when she sat outside her tent at Base Camp, the sun warming her back as she stared up at the mountain, she wasn’t so sure. She felt safe, the mountain looked beautiful, she and Kurt had already gotten to within 300 meters of the summit, and they were ready. Should she once again leave K2 in defeat or give it one last try? She was there, after all, and it seemed so ridiculous not to try. Perhaps the mountain had had its fill of death. Perhaps the weather would clear, finally, and give them that week of good weather they needed for a credible summit bid. What if they turned away, as they had in 1984, only to be greeted by a week of perfect weather in which they summited Broad Peak instead? Would she get a fourth chance at K2? Would she even want it? She could sense that Diemberger was still eager to try for the summit, but he didn’t say anything, just watched her out of the corner of his eye. She didn’t want to disappoint him. She didn’t want to be the one to call it quits. But she was emotionally spent, empty. There had been so much death. She didn’t want to see any more. She didn’t want to bury any more bodies. She didn’t want to risk that the next one could be her own. But how could she let Diemberger down? He wanted it so badly.

Rather than commit to a full summit bid, they decided to climb at least to Camp II with their filming equipment. ...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Map
• Introduction
• Contents
• Chapter 01
• Chapter 02
• Chapter 03
• Chapter 04
• Chapter 05
• Chapter 06
• Chapter 07
• Chapter 08
• Chapter 09
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Epilogue
• Author’s Note
• Special Thanks
• Chapter Notes
• Selected Bibliography and Source Materials
• About the Author
• Praise
• Copyright
• About the Publisher